Spanish Is Faster Than English, But Mandarin Is Slow

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

By Anne Pycha  | April 15, 2012 | 12

“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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