Language Speed

Stephen Burns

Michael Kleine, Language Theory

2/26/15

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We all know what its like to hear a foreign language being rattled off at some
incomprehensibly fast speed. Its easy to get the idea that we find foreign languages to sound
really fast just because theyre foreign. But have you ever gotten the feeling that some
languages genuinely seem to be spoken faster than others? To most Americans, German
sounds a bit slow and lumbering, while Spanish sounds swift and energetic. Our perceptions
about the relative speeds of different foreign languages often go hand-in-hand with our
perceptions of the people who speak that language. The frenetic pace of Spanish seems to
match the colorful and passionate culture of the countries of Latin America; the slowness of
German seems to match the sternness and austerity of the German people.
So why do so many Americans get this sense that some languages sound faster than
others? One theory is that languages arent actually spoken at different rates; we perceive them
as being faster based on certain preexisting biases we have of the culture behind the language.
Another theory is that languages do move at different speeds as a direct reflection of the mental
state of the speakers of that language. Thus Hispanics speak Spanish quickly because they are
passionate and impulsive; Germans speak German slowly because they are more methodical
and cautious. A third possibility is that some languages are simply more phonetically complex
and consequently impose a physical limit the speech rate of its speakers. Any student of
German certainly can imagine how all those consonants in German words would have to slow
the language downeven for native speakers1.
It wasnt until I stumbled across a study conducted by three French linguists at the
University of Lyon to answer this question through scientific inquiry that linguistic curiosities
formerly left to my imagination were given a systematic and theory-based explanation. A
Cross-Language Perspective on Speech Information Rate details an experiment a couple of
years ago which identifies the relationship between how quickly speakers of different languages
1 A fun example, try pronouncing the German word Weihnachtsstimmung (Christmas mood).
The chtsst clusters five consonants together!

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produce sounds, how much meaning each of those sounds carries, and ultimately how quickly
speakers of different languages convey information. Do some languages allow for speakers to
express information faster than others? Do phonetic or grammatical complexities slow the
speech and thought processes of some languages? What is the connection between the speed
at which a given language is spoken, and the intellects of its native speakers? This study
elucidates many of these mysteries and truly gets at the heart of mankinds universal linguistic
competence.

The Experiment2

Offering a careful scientific approach, three French linguists at the University of Lyon
gathered fifty-nine volunteers who spoke either English, German, French, Italian, Spanish,
Mandarin or Japanese as their native tongue. They gave each volunteer a prompt in their
native language and asked them to read it at a normal speech rate, without emotional or
stylistic expression they wouldnt use in day-to-day conversation. There were twenty different
prompts, each text composed of five semantically-connected sentences which took the form of a
short narrative. Below is one of the main prompts they used, written in English:

Last night I opened the front door to let the cat out. It was such a beautiful evening that I
wandered down the garden for a breath of fresh air. Then I heard a click as the door
closed behind me. I realised I'd locked myself out. To cap it all, I was arrested while I
was trying to force the door open!

2 For a fun, visual representation of this data and of the whole experiment, check out this website:
http://visual.ly/speed-language.

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Speakers of all seven test languages were asked to read this or other prompts, and the linguists
meticulously recorded their performances. In total, 585 recordings were taken, with a total
duration of about 150 minutes. Using this data, the linguists had to measure the average speed
at which speakers of these languages would normally speak. The linguists recorded how many
syllables the speakers used and how long they spoke to complete the prompt, giving them the
syllable ratethe number of syllables a speaker produced per secondas the basic measure
of how fast that language is spoken. Interestingly, they found a contrast in ratios which largely
correlate with our stereotypical views of how fast other languages sound. German came in at
5.97 syllables per second, which is slower than English at 6.19 syllables per second. Spanish
came in at 7.82 syllables per second, leaving German and English behind. Japanese actually
came in the fastest at 7.84 syllables per second, leaving all the other languages in the dust.
This data proves that some languages are indeed spoken faster than others. The
stereotype that Spanish is spoken faster and that German is spoken slower than English is an
accurate perception. However, it would be all too easy to make the wrong inference from this
finding. It seemed that the volunteers were generally finishing their prompts within the same
basic time duration. So for the next step, the linguists further looked for how much information
or meaning was being carried by each syllable. After all, just because speakers of a given
language are producing syllables faster doesnt mean they are producing meaning faster, and a
discrepancy between the two would explain how the volunteers were speaking at different
speeds but finishing the prompts at similar durations.
All the volunteers were reading a prompt with the exact same semantic content (they
were all the same narrative), so the linguists created an arbitrary but consistent way of
measuring how much each syllable contributed to the expression of the semantic content.
Using Vietnamese as an external test language, the linguists compared how much meaning the
average syllable of each language was carrying. The ratio of semantic meaning to syllable
produced a figure the linguists called information density, where a denser language could

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express more meaning per syllable and a less dense language could express less meaning
per syllable.
So what is the correlation between a languages syllable rate and its information
density? Comparing each languages syllable rate and information density, the linguists were
able to figure out the information rate of each language, or basically how quickly a language
conveys information. What they found confirmed that all languages have the same basic
information rate. In other words, although speakers of different languages may speak slower or
faster, they are all getting their ideas across at the same speed! The table below summarizes
the findings of A Cross-Language Perspective on Speech Information Rate, clearly showing
that a negative correlation exists between information density and syllable rate, thus allowing
languages spoken at different speeds to arrive at the same information rate.
Language

Information Density

Syllable Rate

Information Rate

English

.91

6.19

1.08

French

.74

7.18

.99

German

.79

5.97

.90

Italian

.72

6.99

.96

Japanese

.49

7.84

.74

Mandarin

.94

5.18

.94

Spanish

.63

7.82

.98

Vietnamese

1 (reference)

5.22

1 (reference)

Limitations of the Experiment

To date, this study is easily the most comprehensive and professional approach to the
matter of language speeds and information rates. But there are several shortcomings with this
experiment and questions the experiment doesnt fully answer.

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First of all, the experiment probably suffers from having too small a pool of volunteers.
59 speakers and 585 recordings is a good data pool for a cursory analysis, but the relatively
small number of volunteers may explain certain eccentricities in the data. For example, why is
the information rate for Japanese so much lower than that of every other language? With a
median information rate of .96, and the maximum of 1.08 information rate only .08 points denser
than the median, it is strange (and conspicuous) that Japanese falls a full .2 points below this
median density. In the experiment, the linguists point out how the syllable rate actually varied
quite widely from speaker to speaker of the same language. If you do such an experiment with
too few speakers, youre likely to get eccentric data that doesnt accurately represent the
linguistic norm of your language. Given languages as disparate as English and Chinese are
tested, Japanese hardly can be viewed as a radical or obscure departure from the rest of
human languages.
As disparate as these selected languages are, the experiment might have included at
least one or two language from a few other linguistic branches: maybe a Slavic language, or an
African language, or any number of minority dialects from anywhere in the world. This
experiment only looked at five Western European languages and two Far East languages.
Another issue with the experiment is the method they used to measure the speed of the
languages. Namely, is a syllable-per-second ratio the most accurate way of understanding the
speed at which a given language is spoken? Consider the two monosyllabic words I (the firstperson singular pronoun) and Fire. Both words are a single syllable and contain the
phoneme /ay/. But Fire contains three phonemes (/f/, /ay/ and /r/) whereas I only contains
the phoneme /ay/. Even though they are both considered monosyllabic, some syllables involve
many more sounds than others, it may reasonably be inferred that a language with more
phonemes per syllable would sound faster than a language with less phonemes per syllable,

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even if both languages have the same syllable rate.3 Perhaps the linguists should have
analyzed sounds per second rather than syllables per second.
Yet another concern is the manner in which the linguists calculated the information
density of the different languages. I wrote earlier in the paper that the prompts which the
volunteers read were all anchored by sharing a common narrative, and thus holding the exact
same semantic content. If this is true, then there method of calculating the semantic meaning
being conveyed by the average syllable is accurate. But one might suppose that no two
languages can express the precise same thought. Look back at the prompt sample from earlier
and consider the different connotations common words might have from one language to
another. For example, in America we think of gardens as being common things we have right in
front of our houses. But in Japan, gardens are few and far between, and the only ones most
Japanese people see are national gardens of royal descent or of national prestige. Such a
simple word as garden may carry a different connotationand thus a different semantic value
from one culture to another. And a different semantic value would mean that an American
and a Japanese speaker might say the word at a different speech (assuming the information
rates of the two languages are indeed the same.) The difference may seem slight, but
compound it by all the different words which may carry different connotations between cultures,
and the discrepancies are compounded. This experiment assumes that the different
translations of the same prompt express the exact same idea to all the volunteers, and this may
not be the case.

Broader Linguistic Implications

3 Consider a German word like spricht which contains six phonemes (/ /, /p/, /r/, /i/, // and /t/).

On its face, A Cross-Language Perspective on Speech Information Rate explains that all
languages convey information at the same rate. In showing the negative correlation between
syllable rate and information density, it explains how it is that a language might involve making
more sounds but will not express semantic meaning any faster than a language which might
involve making few sounds. Beyond this basic conclusion, the experiment opens a rich
discussion of basic human language capacity and the universals of how all people construct and
use language.
The fact that all languages have the same basic information rate points to the basic,
shared cognitive capacity of all people to produce and comprehend language. The idea that
humankind shares a common language gene (Foxp2) which enables us to use language is
powerfully validated by the fact that we all use language with such equal capacity. As different
as languages like German and Chinese may becompletely isolated from each other for many
millenniathey still hold a strikingly similar information rate. The only significant different to be
found in information rates comes in the way people change their speech patterns between
different social contexts. Such universal similarities in information rate show that all human
languages are equally valid, practical and intelligent.
The findings of this experiment also support studies of child language acquisition. As
Breyne Moskowitz points out in her article The Acquisition of Language, all children learn their
mother tongue at about the same time. A group of Russian linguists tried to train a child to learn
the mother tongue faster, and they found that a child may only learn linguistic concepts a few
days earlier than they would have if theyd learned it naturally. Infants born under a language
with a high degree of inflection like Russian or a low degree of inflection like Chinese will learn
their mother tongue at a remarkably similar time. The fact that different languages have
different syllable rates means that infants of different languages will learn to speak at different
speeds; but the information they convey is all done at about the same rate.

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To conclude with no less than Noam Chomsky, I think this experiment really gets at the
core of what Chomsky calls linguistic competence. However language is performed outwardly,
we all have the same basic thought processes going on behind that performance. If we could
escape the linguistic performance of foreign languages and get at the ideal linguistic realities
beneath, perhaps foreign languages wouldnt seem so foreign to us. The experiment about
language information rate only looked at two basic factors: syllable rate and information density.
But there are many other factors of linguistic performance that could be analyzed for a deeper
understanding of how language works across all languages. Beyond syllable rate and
information density, what other etic elements of language might we be able to parse and better
comprehend with similar experiments? What emic structures of language might we discover to
be universal, beyond just the information rate? The more experiments like this one show that
we all produce and comprehend language basically the same way, the more evidence we have
that all of mankind is linked by this fundamental linguistic function.

Bibliography

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Francois Pellegrino and Christophe Coupe and Egidio Marsico. A Cross-Language Perspective
on Speech Information Rate. Lyon: University of Lyon. 2011. Retrieved online at
<http://www.ddl.ish-lyon.cnrs.fr/fulltext/pellegrino/Pellegrino_to
%20appear_Language.pdf>.
Moskowitz, Breyne. The Acquisition of Language. In Language: Introductory Readings. 1978.
613-638. Print.
The Speed of Language. Retrieved online at <http://visual.ly/speed-language>.
Trafton, Anne. Neuroscientists Identify Key Role of Language Gene. MIT News: On Campus
and Around the World. 2014. Retrieved online from
<http://newsoffice.mit.edu/2014/language-gene-0915>.