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Are some languages spoken faster than others?!
With around 7,000 languages in the world (although 90% of those are spoken by less than 100,000 people), you’d be forgiven for thinking that some languages are spoken more quickly than others. As an English speaker when you hear someone speaking another language it can sound like they’re racing through what would definitely take longer to say in English. But this is in fact a common misconception.
It seems that it’s nothing to do with the actual language itself – it’s more about perception. Research suggests that the phenomenon is actually a cognition issue with the listener who is unable to keep up with something they don’t understand. It makes sense that when you don’t understand what’s being said it can seem like the speaker is going nineteen to the dozen!
When you are a native speaker of a language you understand how the rhythm of that language works – we hear not just the words and know what they mean but we also hear the gaps in between. When we hear a foreign language, we perceive the speech as one continuous flow, so it appears to be moving faster – the more acquainted we become with a language the more attuned to its rhythm we are and the language no longer seems to be moving as rapidly.
Languages have different rhythms too, and this rhythm difference can make some languages just seem faster by their very nature. Spanish or French, which are both “syllable-timed” languages seem to race along, unlike English which is defined as “stress-timed” and has a simpler syllable structure. The difference between the two is in the rhythm – with syllable-timed languages all syllables tend to be given equal amounts of time and this is often referred to as a “machine gun rhythm”, while in stress-timed languages more time is given to stressed syllables and less to unstressed, which means the rhythm is more like Morse code.
This article in Time magazine illustrates the point perfectly. To summarise, a French university ran an experiment using 59 male and female volunteers who were native speakers of one of seven common languages — English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Mandarin and Spanish. They also enlisted a Vietnamese speaker as a less common, syllable dense language as a way in which to benchmark the other languages. Each person read 20 different texts in their native language and the “speed” of the speech was measured by how many syllables were used. The results showed that languages where each syllable conveyed more meaning sounded slower, as less syllables per second were required to get the same amount of information across. They use less syllables and therefore appear to the listener to be slower.
What’s fascinating is that despite the fact that Japanese (a syllable dense language) seems to race ahead while Mandarin (a stress-timed language) seems to amble along, by the end of the set time both languages had communicated exactly the same amount of information! There’s an average speech rate of between 160 and 190 words per minute, whatever the language, and the same amount of information is conveyed whatever end of the spectrum the language sits at.
So there you go… it’s all an illusion![/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]