Spanish is faster than English, but Mandarin is slow (2024)

Spanish is faster than English, but Mandarin is slow

Some languages ​​sound faster than others, but most convey information at the same speed

DoorAnne Pycha

“Speakers of some languages ​​seem to rattle at high speed like machine guns, while other languages ​​sound rather slow and vague,” wrote linguist Peter Roach in 1998. A few months ago, researchers systematically quantified Roach's observations and offered a surprising explanation. Last year in an issue of the magazineTaalFrançois Pellegrino and his colleagues from the University of Lyon in France published their analysis of the speech of 59 people who read the same twenty texts aloud in seven languages. They found that Japanese and Spanish, often described as "fast languages", had the highest number of syllables per syllable. second. The “slowest” language in the set was Mandarin, followed closely by German.

But the story doesn't end there. The researchers also calculated the information density of each language's syllables by comparing them to an eighth language, Vietnamese, which served as a random reference. They found that an average Spanish syllable conveys only a small amount of information and contributes only a fragment to the overall meaning of a sentence. In contrast, an individual Mandarin syllable contains a much larger amount of information, possibly because Mandarin syllables contain tones. The result is that Spanish and Mandarin actually convey information to listeners at about the same rate. The correlation between speaking rate and information density held true for five of the seven languages ​​studied, and the researchers suspected that despite the diversity of languages ​​in the world, they all yield a constant information rate over time, possibly fine-tuned for humans. perceptual system.

The results of these studies could change the way we think about the diversity of the world's languages. In the 1950s, linguist Noam Chomsky proposed the idea of ​​universal grammar, which suggests that all languages, regardless of their apparent differences, share a common set of abstract structures. This hypothesis has given the field of linguistics a boost, but truly common structures have proven difficult to find. Current research shows that languages ​​can and do use a wide variety of structures, as long as they deliver information to listeners at a relatively constant rate. Thinking of this way, universal grammar is no longer an abstract concept, but a core of human communication that provides a steady flow of information from speaker to listener.

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The article was published in print as "Fast Talkers".