One language is spoken faster than another – but the most important thing is still what is said

Japanese the speaker produces syllables of words very quickly.

Some researchers say that Japanese is the fastest spoken language in the world. This is calculated based on the syllables of the language.

We remember staves from elementary school. Many learned to read with them: äi-ti, lap-si, ta-lo.

Syllables also help adults. They tell us, for example, how written words are divided into different lines.

Of syllables speed of speech came to the fore when a popular science magazine Popular Science tried to clear up one reader’s question. He wanted to know why people speak languages ​​at different speeds.

Research from the University of Lyon, France compared the speaking speed of seven languages in laboratory conditions in 2011. Japanese was spoken the fastest in this test.

It was pronounced at an average of 7.8 syllables per second. English, more familiar to us, was spoken at 6.2 syllables per second.

Finns too the speed of speech has been studied, but with different methods. Determined the speed research in 2018.

70 Finns participated in the test. The researchers calculated the speed of speech to be an average of 3.77 bytes per second, says the university lecturer in phonetics Heini Kallio from the University of Tampere.

The researchers also calculated the rate of articulation. That’s the speed of speech without pauses, and was about 5.6 bytes per second. Kallio did not participate in this study.

I will speak however, the syllable is not easily used as a measure of speed. Syllables don’t tell everything about speech.

“The speed of speech measured from the Japanese is partly explained by how long the words are in the language,” says Kallio.

“Japanese and also Finnish have quite a lot of relatively long, mo-ni-ta-vui-si-a words. In English, on the other hand, there are many monosyllabic words.”

In English, however, one single syllable can contain more information than in Japan or Finland.

In English, on the other hand, there are syllables that contain a lot of sounds, phonemes. One short sentence can carry 29 different phonemes in English. They are the basic units of sounds in spoken language.

In Japan, syllables contain only a few different sounds. Maybe that’s why you can speak Japanese much faster than English.

Wake up question, is there any benefit to speaking fast? Does it carry more information?

Information reduces uncertainty, reads one of the definitions. Researchers measure the amount of information in bits.

The bit was precisely defined by a famous physicist Claude Shannon already in the late 1940s. He especially studied the information contained in languages ​​when he developed kulu his information theory.

In information technology, the term bit is still commonly used. It describes units of information.

Bit comes from the words binary digit. It is the smallest and ultimate unit of digital information, zero or one.

English and the Japanese languages ​​therefore convey meanings with different information densities, as does Finnish.

Is there a limit to how much information our brain can take in?

Linguists from the University of Lyon tried to find out this too in 2019. They looked for the relationship between the speed of speech and the density of its information.

He studied 170 speakerswho read the same text in 17 different languages. The researchers measured how long it took the participants to read the same text.

The slowest speaker uttered only 4.3 syllables per second, while the fastest reached 9.1 syllables per second. So the speed of speech varied significantly.

Then the researchers calculated the information contained in the syllables of the language using Shannon’s theory.

One measure of information was whether you could guess which syllable and word would follow in the language based on the previous syllable or what was said. Very common ones work on the same principle artificial intelligence LLM models.

Linguists produced a new metric for speech research: information speed.

It determines how much information a language can convey per second. The speed didn’t seem to vary much between different languages.

The researchers tried to determine this “general information rate”.

It is about 39 bits per second. The number would be a rough upper limit for how fast the human brain can understand speech.

Sociolinguist Erica Brozovsky to point out Popular Science – magazine, that the participants read a prepared text in the Lyon tests. It may not capture all the features of everyday speech.

Researchers are now collecting examples, especially from languages ​​that are not Western or European. Almost 7,000 languages ​​are spoken in the world.

Linguists can perhaps find out by comparison whether the calculation of the speed of information transfer is valid for all languages. At least all languages ​​are interpreted by the same human brain.

And the speed of speech might not matter much. What we say should be more important than how fast we say it.

In everyday life in language use, the speed of articulation and speech as well as the speed of conveying information vary a lot, says Kallio.

Finns speech material was compiled for research with the help of picture narration. The speed was therefore slower than in the French study, which examined reading speed.

“In a picture story, the speaker may have to look for suitable words when he describes what he sees. It slows down speech production,” says Kallio.

“An interesting point of view is how we also allow silence, i.e. pauses in speech,” says Kallio. This was not a comprehensive language comparison.