by ANNE PYCHA
Some languages sound faster than others, but most convey information at the same rate
“Speakers of some languages seem to rattle away at high speed like machine-guns, while other languages sound rather slow and plodding,” wrote linguist Peter Roach in 1998. A few months ago researchers systematically quantified Roach’s observation and offered a surprising explanation. Last year, in an issue of the journal Language, François Pellegrino and his colleagues at the University of Lyon in France published their analysis of the speech of 59 people reading the same 20 texts aloud in seven languages. They found Japanese and Spanish, often described as “fast languages,” clocked the greatest number of syllables per second. The “slowest” language in the set was Mandarin, followed closely by German.
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