The question has fascinated linguists and curious for decades, and the answer is much more complex and fascinating than one could imagine – because beyond the speed, the efficiency in the transmission of information also counts.
Investigators have gathered people from around the world to read texts in their native languages in order to unravel a suspicion that had been intriguing them for decades – will there be faster languages than others?
Considering only gross speed – that is, the number of syllables pronounced per second – it was possible to conclude that yes, and who takes the gold medal in this criterion is the Japanese.
According to one published in 2011 by researchers at the University of Lyon in France, the Japanese language reaches an impressive pace of 7.84 syllables per second.
Secondly, practically tied, is the Spanishwith 7.82 syllables per second. Follow the French (7,18), o Italian (6,99), o English (6,19), o German (5.97) and the mandarin (5,18).
These results were corroborated by the same researchers in a broader investigation in 2019, in which linguist François Pellegrino and his team confirmed that of the 17 languages studied, the fastest in terms of syllables per second were Japanese and Spanish, although with slight variations.
The study put the Basque Third, the Finnish fourth and the Italian in fifth; At the other end of the scale were Cantonese, Vietnamese and Thai. Portuguese does not appear in the sample.
Everything seems to indicate that there is a clear winner. But the question arises: Is a language really “faster” just because it conveys more syllables per second?
Information density
Pellegrino and his colleagues have discovered something surprising: there is an inverse correlation between speech speed and the density of information. In other words, the Languages spoken faster tend to contain less information per syllable.
The Japanese, for example, has an extremely simple syllabic structure, usually a consonant followed by a vowel, five vowels available. On the other hand, English, although five letters to represent vowels, has approximately 20 different vowel sounds, according to the obscure Atlas. And a single English syllable can be extremely complex: for example, the word ‘Strength’ forms a block with several grouped consonants.
A universal limit of the human brain?
The most fascinating of all is that, according to the investigation, when considering both the speed and the density of information, all the studied languages transmit information about the same speed: about 39 bits per second.
“It’s like bird wings,” Christophe Coupe, one of the study’s authors, told The Economist magazine in 2019. “There can be large wings that need a few beats per second, or have small wings that need to hit a lot, but the result is practically the same in terms of flight.”
This compensation between speed and density seems to indicate that there is an ideal range of speeds within which the human brain can process information efficiently, regardless of the spoken language.
What does the speed measure?
It is important to clarify that there are many variants at stake. For example, within the same language, speakers do not always have the same rhythm of speech: context, state of mind and the environment influence a lot.
Therefore, It all depends on how we define “speed”. Are we talking about syllables per second? Of words? Of the amount of information transmitted? Of the cognitive effort needed to process the message?
Linguists can measure speed based on articulatory rhythm, subjective perception or even the degree of uncertainty that is resolved with each syllable, using the Claude Shannon’s Information TheoryAmerican mathematician and engineer who quantified information in the 1940s.
In this sense, the question is further complicated when we consider these other aspects of language. For example, some languages are more efficient in the way they encode information. In Portuguese, we can omit the personal pronoun (“I am” by “Sou”), while in Hebrew there is not even the verb “being”, being the pronoun used in its place (for example, “I” conveys the meaning of “I Am”).
Even more surprising is the case of paamaa language spoken on an island of Vanuatu, where possessives include information about the relationship between the speaker and the object. “My coconut” is not simply “my coconut”: it can mean “my coconut, which I want to eat” or “my coconut, which I cultivated” or “my coconut, which I will use in my house differently from eating or drinking.”
So what is the fastest language?
The answer, as often happens in science, is: depends. Ignoring many complexities and focusing only on syllables per second, the Japanese wins. But if we consider efficiency in information transmission, all languages seem to have evolved to a similar point.
It is important to stress that most of these studies have focused on European and eastern Asian languages, setting aside thousands of fascinating languages that exist in the world and could challenge all our current assumptions.
