Spanish speakers sound quicker than English speakers to my ear.
Recent article in TIME on this very subject: Why Some Languages Sound So Fast.
It reports on research that focuses on the “density” of the syllables in a particular language. Some languages use a lot of syllables that don’t contribute a great deal to meaning, so tend to be spoken more quickly to get the meaning across; Spanish is identified as one of them. Other languages are considered to have “denser” syllables, so pack more meaning into fewer syllables and need not be spoken so quickly.
I’ve forgotten the terms, but some languages are “stress-timed,” versus a syllabic-based timing. People say French people talk fast, but if you time it, they don’t actually speak quickly – it’s a different system and it doesn’t take any less time to get across the same message as English (or Hungarian, or Finnish or Portuguese IIRC or somewhat in German). Just everything’s a lot more “even,” instead of hanging on every stressed syllable and swallowing up the rest in giant gulps.
IDK the definitive answer.
But. Spanish is quicker for two reasons: 1) sentences are longer so you have to say them faster. 2) multiple words are combined - if there is a word with an ending vowel followed by a word with a beginning vowel, the words are combined, and the vowels in question become a single vowel or dipthong (repeat as needed). Even more so if sung!
I think the written/newscaster answer will differ from the vocal/real world answer.
[Isochrony - Wikipedia](clonk on stress-timed vs. syllable-timed languages)
Screwed up the title for the link, but that’s a good one (good for Wikipedia) on stress-timed vs. syllable-timed languages. I think I was wrong about Finnish, but I can’t handle 16 declensions, so don’t blame me for not knowing it. My Homeric Greek sucks balls, and that doesn’t have nearly as many difficulties as Finnish – in fact, it’s pretty easy. Don’t judge me!
Interesting that they’ve just published this now; that talking speed is dependent on syllable “density” has been known to linguists for many years—certainly it was covered back when I was doing my undergraduate degree in the late 1990s. The article doesn’t indicate the date of the research study but it wouldn’t surprise me if it were several decades old!
That “experiment,” however, is somewhat flawed, because the the speakers were reading from texts, rather than speaking naturally, in natural contexts.
Also, they were measuring the “meaning/syllable” rate of the language in the abstract (so why did they bother to have anyone speak the text anyway, except for the final measurement of one minute?) English is stress-timed, and primarily the meaning syllables are stressed–that is, the meaning syllables are pronounced louder and longer.
So even though English has a higher information density per syllable, the non-information syllables are spoken less audibly and more quickly. Most of English is fast–it’s just that you don’t “hear”* the fast part (the grammatical morphology, etc.) because it’s spoken at such a comparatively lower volume. It’s more a question of perception.
*Native speakers, of course, usually do hear that “non-meaning” information; it’s much more revealing to notice how much of it non-native speakers will miss.
My wife is a professional translator (French --> English). Her experience is that when you go from French to English, the length of the printed text shrinks by about 5%. When you go from English to French (she doesn’t do that but worked at an agency which had translation both ways) it typically grows by 10-15%. But the French doesn’t take any longer to speak. So it seems clear that they are getting more syllables in, but entirely plausible that each syllable conveys less information.
The other possible explanation for the phenomenon you’ve described could be that there are (on average) more letters per syllable in the French language than in the English. Consider “chateaux” versus “bacon”. Anyone know of any such metric being reported on somewheres?
That really doesn’t have anything to do with speaking, though. The letters used to represent language on paper don’t affect the way people produce those sounds in speech (except in highly affected and artificial situations). Speech exists before writing, and a syllable is unit of speech, not writing.
At least IMO – French written language uses so many formulas that are de rigueur whereas we efficient, business-minded English just say “See you, wouldn’t want to be ya” as opposed to “I’d like to accord you the most distinguished respect, believe me, and I’m yours truly, sir.”
“Chateaux” has 4 phonemes while “bacon” has 5. So in your example, the English word has more sounds per syllable than the French.
Explain, please? I don’t get this. Both words have two syllables, and two phonemes AFAICT.
No, phonemes are separate sounds rather than syllables. I’m too lazy to look up the equivalent IPA symbols representing the phonemes in these two words, but roughly, they are:
In “chateaux”: consonant sound (that we Anglophones would write) “sh”, vowel sound “a”, consonant sound “t”, vowel sound “o”. Four of 'em.
In “bacon”: consonant, vowel, consonant, vowel, consonant. That’s five.
OK, ignorance fought. I used to teach linguistics as a lecturer/professor too – but it’s been a while. I would have gone with something like /shae/ + /to/ (not doing the character map for this). Good to know/remember.
I think that French is the equilivent of cursive; it just runs on and on. (I wouldn’t mind hearing some Welch tho, with it’s stops and explanation points apropos to nothing.)
If I may, not really. French may sound fast, but listen to Ce’line (the writer, not that other one) – he praticically stutters, and so do most Frenchmen I hear. A literary style demands finding le mot juste, and for most natives, it takes them a while to find the right word. An analogy might be a game-show host in English language – they certainly speak quickly, no?
And a plug for “L’homme atlantique,” narrated by Marguerite Duras, (It’s a movie, for those playing along at home). Anyone can follow that with even just HS French. They may not want to, but most Frenchmen wouldn’t care for the movie anyway.
Cryptic C62 was responding to Hari Seldon’s comment that translating written English into French tends to inflate the length of the text, while translating French into English deflates it somewhat. It’s a well-known effect, though I have no idea if it is in fact due to the number of mute letters in French.
That’s not the explanation either, since the effect is visible in any text translated from French to English or vice versa, not only business correspondence. And in any case, I’m not convinced French business correspondence is more flowery than English. Both languages are becoming increasingly informal.
French people (from France) speak faster than French speaking Swiss. It’s the exact same language.