Is there such a thing as a “speed” of how a language is typically (or acceptably) spoken? Is there a ranking of “faster” and “slower” languages?
I am always complaining to my husband (a native Swedish speaker) that people generally – not newscasters, etc, but average speakers – seem to speak really rapidly. (Faster than English, in any case.) He thinks this is entirely my perception, that my brain is just not good enough at processing the language yet. This may be true, but in any case it got me wondering the question…
Of the languages I can even pretend to converse in, Spanish is the fastest, Russian the slowest, and English and French in the middle, about even. I’m talking in terms of syllables per second in normal conversation.
Caveat: my Russian consists of one semester in college, so maybe that’s why I think it’s a slow language.
I think this may be culture-specific, but not necessarily language-specific. Non-American speakers of English generally observe that American speakers of English speak comparatively slowly.
OneCentStamp, sounds like you are with me on this concept!
Interesting observation, UDS. I have never heard this, though I think the American president speaks so slowly I want to get a cattle prod to urge him through his speeches. I hope you’re not judging us based on him!
Now where are all the Doper linguists who said they want to answer GQ topics? Didn’t I read that in a Pit thread just the other day?
Yeah, this varies waaaay too much by culture. I speak reasonable French and can generally understand everything a Cameroonian tells me. But give me a French person and I won’t be able to understand a word. Meanwhile, Cameroonians who are native English speakers don’t understand a word I say.
Agreed. I’m fully bilingual in Spanish, but a lot of people from the Caribbean - Dominican Republic, Cuba, and especially Puerto Rico - talk so much faster than the Mexicans and South Americans I’m used to that I’m constantly going “excuse me?”
Firstly, I don’t fully understand all the information given in the link below.
Notwithstanding that caveat, and acknowledging the influence of culture specific factors mentioned upthread, the answer may also depend on context.
Halfway down this page under Speed, there’s a nifty diagram which compares Italian, French, Spanish & Portuguese in words per second spoken under various circumstances. The Y axis denotes words per second. The X axis gives as follows, or at least my reading of the abbreviations does:
.
.
. tel priv - private phone conversation
fam d/c - family dialogue/conversation
pub d/c - public dialogue/conversation
nat d/c - natural dialogue/conversation
fam m - family monologue
media
pub m - public monologue
nat m - natural monologue
.
.
.
I hope this helps. If it doesn’t then criticise me in Italian.
I remember reading, once, that some Native American cultures were pre-disposed towards long, contemplative pauses in conversation.
Any validity to that?
One of the big problems when looking at the “speed” of a spoken language is deciding what to actually measure, but there is a lot of cross-linguistic variation in various dimensions. The word-per-second piece that Chez’s paper mentions is a pretty strong measurement for Isolating Languages, like English, which have a small morpheme-per-word ratio. If you were going to look at something like a polysynthetic language, however, you’d generally expect to see longer words in which a larger amount of meaning was tacked onto each word. In that case, you’d probably get a more accurate measurement by looking at the number of syllables per second.
Something else to note is that languages tend to sound faster if the listener doesn’t speak that particular language. English, for instance, actually sounds a lot faster than most native speakers think it does. Generally this is caused by a perceptual device; when you can mentally break the speech stream down into morphemes (e.g. into its meaningful units), you tend to insert mental pauses that correspond to word boundaries.
But to answer the OP: a large number of “rate-of-speech” metrics do, in fact, vary cross linguistically.
Oh geez, yes. It obviously depends on the language, but there are certainly indigenous cultures in which this holds true. I once had a professor who worked on the Athapaskan languages, and she told me that a native Navajo speaker would often take up to twice as long to read a single page of typed Navajo text as they would to read a full page of English text, owing mainly to the pauses and whatnot.
I think **UDS ** has a good point. My work (large software company) is a giant melting pot, which is cool for observing the way that different people speak English.
To make the question a little more muddy…
You’ve got fluent English, you’ve got broken English, you’ve got cultural gradations, you’ve got regional gradations, you’ve got individual twitches. To use a broad brush, Noo Yawkers will burble on extremely fast, Southerners will drawl/twang somewhat. Some people mumble, some people blast on.
It’s not like other countries are monolithic entities, so you’re going to get the same kind of gradations with any given spoken language that Americans get with English.
