# Rapidity of Speech in Different Languages



## fobits

Hello everybody:

I hope that this is appropriate in the Cultural Discussions forum, as I can't think of a better place for it.

Like most anglophones, I have the impression that Spanish is usually spoken very rapidly, with many syllables per second, 
but I never made a fool of myself by saying anything about it.

I always assumed that it was an illusion caused by lack of familiarity. If you aren't very familiar with a language, 
then native speakers may always sound as if they are speaking rapidly, but it isn't necessarily true. 
It's just that your brain can't keep up.

Then a forero provided a link to an interesting article on the development of Spanish from Latin. 
This is the part that really struck me:

_The vowels of Spanish are the same as in Latin, except that all distinction of quantity is lost, and y is treated as identical to i. _
_They are pronounced like the Latin long vowels but are generally held for only a very short time. _
_This feature of the language allows Spanish speakers to comfortably speak at nearly twice the rate of English._

Does that mean that it isn't an illusion? Is Spanish actually spoken twice as fast, it terms of syllables per second, as English? 
That's even faster than it sounds like.  

I wonder if anybody has any objective information on the rapidity of speech in different languages, 
since subjective impressions are highly unrelible.


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## cuchuflete

Syllables per second is no measure of the rapidity of speech, unless you can calculate the average number of syllables per word.

Perhaps this will help you.  I once translated a user interface for an AS/400 logistics application from English to Spanish.  I quickly discovered that I needed more characters for Spanish than for English.  I did a little research into "localization" of software, and found that, as a working generality, Spanish required about 30% more characters than English to express the same thing.  

If we take that fact, or conventional wisdom—I'll leave it to the experts to confirm or deny it—then in order to express a common idea in Spanish in about the same time frame required to do the same in English, I would need to speak more quickly.


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## Grekh

I think that the rapidity of the speech when speaking spanish depends on the place you're listening to the speakers. There are some places where they speak really slow and others where people speak really fast. I think this happens in every language and not only spanish.


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## jabogitlu

I don't know with regards to the initial query, but I agree with Grekh.  In the US alone, compare Valley Girl teenagers to Georgia (or Piedmont) farmers.  Big speed difference.


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## danielfranco

Another big generalization: the rural people tend to speak slower than their harried urban counterparts. For example, compare the bucolic and relaxed East Texan drawl to the frantic machine-gun drawl of DFW or Houston. Or compare the looooong enunciation of the northern Mexicans (many regions there are rural) to the lilting sing-song of the Federal District inhabitants.

But back to the original question, I always thought that English enabled me to speak faster than Spanish because there seems to be more commonly-used English words that are monosyllabic, compared to the more commonly spoken words in Spanish.
Or so it seems to my uncultured perceptions.


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## fobits

cuchuflete said:


> Syllables per second is no measure of the rapidity of speech, unless you can calculate the average number of syllables per word.


 
The writer didn't say how it was measured. In fact he just threw the statement out with no explaination at all.

Syllables per second, or phonomes per second, seems like the most logical way. It is a measure of how rapidly the speaker is moving his or her lips and tongue, going from one sound to the next. When I say "rapidity of speaking", that's basicly what I mean.

Counting words per second or ideas per second adds complications. As you note, the average lengths of words may be different. One language may require more words than another, on the average, to express the meaning.



Grekh said:


> I think that the rapidity of the speech when speaking spanish depends on the place you're listening to the speakers. There are some places where they speak really slow and others where people speak really fast. I think this happens in every language and not only spanish.


 
That's very true. 

The more that I think about the statement in the article, the more questionable it seems. Which Spanish speakers is he talking about, compared to which English speakers?  He says that Spanish can be spoken _comfortably _at nearly twice the rate, but comfortably to whom?

It's an startling claim, but without some definitions it's almost meaningless.

Thanks for your input.


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## HUMBERT0

fobits said:


> Hello everybody:
> 
> 
> Then a forero provided a link to an interesting article on the development of Spanish from Latin.
> This is the part that really struck me:
> 
> _The vowels of Spanish are the same as in Latin, except that all distinction of quantity is lost, and y is treated as identical to i. _
> _They are pronounced like the Latin long vowels but are generally held for only a very short time. _
> _This feature of the language allows Spanish speakers to comfortably speak at nearly twice the rate of English._


From what I can understand in this article, not having long vowels, you save time by spending less time pronouncing them, it sounds reasonable, but twice the rate sounds to much.
However, If I do remember correctly, is that Spanish is a non dropping sound language, you do not loose sounds when you speak fast, all sounds must be enunciated (so pena de ser acusado de no tener buena dicción), so you increase the rate or rather the rhythm at which you speak, whereas English is a sound dropping language, when you speak fast you loose sounds, and you need not increase the speed to achieve the same goal, words just become shorter.
That’s something Spanish speakers come across when learning English, they want to scrupulously pronounce every single sound when they are speaking as they would in Spanish, because they don’t realize that sounds are droped the faster they need to talk.


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## PhilFrEn

Morgen .

I can definitely not state on Spanish language, because my Spanish is far more than dusty/rusty/dead... .

I will make a statement on French. Not as an expert with figures and graphes, I am not in this field, but only with my personal feelings on this.

What I can realise, is that we speak quite fast in France. When you take a nomal sentence, we "eat" words, shorter often them and so on.

Example:
_- I call you tomorrow to give my adress, so that we can meet each other and talk!
- J't'appelle (je t'a...) demain pour t'donner (te donner...) mon adresse, comme ca on peut s'rencontrer et parler!_

I want to insist on word linking. We have the bad habit to link them (when it is not already a rule like "_des avions" _("s-a" is prononced "za")). With feedback of my German girlfriend, it is really hard for her to get what I say when I speak with my parents on the phone for instance (ok it depends also on the hability in the language of the person, for sure).

Furtherthemore, we don't say 100% of a word, we skipped systematically the letters at the end (example: auparavan(t) / boît(e)...). I can understand somebody who is throwing up each time he tries to learn French (while dealing also with our horrible grammar). By the way, we also use "horrible" in French, but of course as good French, the "h" is not said .

Everything to say that we have a nice language in my opinion, quite rich, but somehow this problem of not saying the "complete" word, causes me problem to write sometime, especially for grammar when I don't know if I have to put a "s", a "t", a "e", "nothing" etc.

That's why I have happy to speak a daily English (and write reports in English ), and to learn German, far more easier, because while speaking, you can easily recognize a word, because a German will say every square meter of the word, from the first letter to the last one!

Tschüsss !
Phil.


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## jabogitlu

> I can understand somebody who is throwing up each time he tries to learn French (while dealing also with our horrible grammar)



A common side affect, to be sure.

I agree, though.  My best friend speaks French and I speak Spanish.  (But we're both North American-English native.)  She can't ever get Spanish pronunciation right, because in general, most syllables are pronounced.  And ~I~ can't ever get French when she tries to teach me, because I try to pronounce everything!

(Well, that's not always necessarily true- I know lots of Mexicans who chop some things, but you can get by just fine by pronouncing everything.)


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## HUMBERT0

Guten Morgen:  
Miren aquí (look here) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timing_(linguistics)


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## ernest_

Until you've heard an Argentinian football commentator in action, you don't know how fast Spanish can be spoken. But I don't think Spanish is a particularly fast language - in general grammar is more complex and you need more words than you need in English to say the same thing. As some have pointed out there's few sound dropping in Spanish - you can drop the 'd' in -ado endings (say 'acabao' instead of 'acabado'), or say 'pa' instead of 'para', but these aren't much of an improvement and would be considered a clear sign of deficient education anyway, at least in Spain.


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## sound shift

ernest_ said:


> Until you've heard an Argentinian football commentator in action, you don't know how fast Spanish can be spoken. But I don't think Spanish is a particularly fast language - in general grammar is more complex and you need more words than you need in English to say the same thing. As some have pointed out there's few sound dropping in Spanish - you can drop the 'd' in -ado endings (say 'acabao' instead of 'acabado'), or say 'pa' instead of 'para', but these aren't much of an improvement and would be considered a clear sign of deficient education anyway, at least in Spain.


I've heard Argentinian football commentators. The only word I understand is "goooooool"!


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## Sepia

All countries I know of have regions where they speak very fast or also very slowly. It is not a town or country thing, though. If you compare North and South Jutland (Denmark) there is a huge difference. In the North somebody from Georgia would feel comfortable and in the South they sometimes speak even faster as in the capital, Copenhagen. One could find similar phenomena in every culture, I think.

Both regions have approx. the same population density. 

Syllables per second would be a good way to measure the speed if they are all pronounced. Phonems per second would satisfy me as well although there shoud be some kind of compensation for phonems that actually belong to a word but are left out for speed.


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## Etcetera

I have the impression that Finnish is more fast than Russian.
But even Russian itself is spoken with different speed in different regions of the country. People in villages and some Southerners tend to prolong all the vowels, so their speech is slower than that of a city inhabitant.


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## Lemminkäinen

Grekh said:


> I think that the rapidity of the speech when speaking spanish depends on the place you're listening to the speakers. There are some places where they speak really slow and others where people speak really fast. I think this happens in every language and not only spanish.



I think this is very true, and although you might find some tendencies in some languages, I think it's pretty individual. Here's a quote from an article I've linked to before (can't find the previous discussion, but it was on this subject):


> First, anyone who has ever taken a look at speech rate, or even thought about it much, knows that people vary in their habitual rates, and that lots of factors affect how fast any given individual talks (emotional state, cognitive load, fatigue, etc.), and that a given individual in a given situation can consciously choose to speak faster or slower. Any one of these factors can easily make a difference of 50% or so. Therefore, a believable cross-language comparison would need a lot of subjects, and you'd have to be certain that you were comparing comparable samples from comparable populations of subjects in comparable settings doing comparable things. Second, because languages have different sound inventories, different word and syllable structures, and different densities of information per word or syllable or whatever, it's not entirely clear how to denominate speaking rate in units that can fairly be compared across languages.



Take a look at this commercial and see what you think (the speaker is from a rural part of Norway, and her speech is considered fast by Norwegian standards).


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## Fernando

As said before:

- Spanish needs more "letters" than English. We use more redundancies in a phrase and more syllables (example: more articles, terminations in "ado" instead of "ed", etc.). Informality and casual phrases are more appreciated in English than in Spanish. ("Yeah" or "Sure" are commonplace).

- The difference in speed is huge. In general, Latin Americans speak slower than Spaniards. Ditto for rural/city dwellers.

- Spanish is very easy to pronounce (for us, at least). So we pronounce very fast. No three consonants in a row.


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## jmx

This thread is related to the discussion :

http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=299820


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## Pedro y La Torre

If you want to hear people speaking quickly listen to Irish people in a pub.


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## tvdxer

cuchuflete said:


> Syllables per second is no measure of the rapidity of speech, unless you can calculate the average number of syllables per word.
> 
> Perhaps this will help you.  I once translated a user interface for an AS/400 logistics application from English to Spanish.  I quickly discovered that I needed more characters for Spanish than for English.  I did a little research into "localization" of software, and found that, as a working generality, Spanish required about 30% more characters than English to express the same thing.
> 
> If we take that fact, or conventional wisdom—I'll leave it to the experts to confirm or deny it—then in order to express a common idea in Spanish in about the same time frame required to do the same in English, I would need to speak more quickly.



That's a good point.  Over and over again, I've noted that while English contains countless fast, monosyllabic words, the vast majority of words used in Spanish and Italian, even everyday ones, have at least two syllables.  I think this has to do with the fact that Spanish and Italian have more complex inflection / conjugation systems.  Spanish also seems to be far less tolerant of consonant clusters than English.


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## Little_Little

Hey!!!

I really don't know anything about the number of sillables per second, but I can tell you that now I'm living in Germany and when German or people from other countries hear Spanish speakers speaking Spanish they always say it sounds incredibly fast!!!

I also have a friend from Colombia, that always tells me that in Spain we speak much faster than they do in Colombia, and thinking about it, that's true... There are some (only some) countries in Southamerica when Spanish sounds slowlier, like Cuba, or Colombia...

Finally, I would like to point that another language that spoken incredibly fast is Greek, I get so stressed when I hear Greek people talking to each other... Me, that I'm supposed to be a fast Spanish speaker!!! 

Anybody agrees with me about the fast Greek?!?!


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## Hutschi

PhilFrEn said:


> [...]
> That's why I have happy to speak a daily English (and write reports in English ), and to learn German, far more easier, because while speaking, you can easily recognize a word, because a German will say every square meter of the word, from the first letter to the last one!
> 
> Tschüsss !
> Phil.


 

Hi, Phil,

could you do me the favour and tell me the name of this German who does this  ? There are a lot of letters dropped or at least weakened, and it depends on the region, what is said. 

Example: In Saxony, "Hamma"="Hammer"="Haben wir", "Morchn"="Guten Morgen" , there are a lot of other examples of shortening words. The teacher always said: "Do not swallow syllables."

We have the "silent e", and the "r" at the end of words is often pronounced as a "schwa"-sound. 

Back to the question.

The speed depends much on the person - and on pragmatics. 
I suppose, in News, they speek slower generally. 


My father speaks very slowly. When he finished two or three words, I completed his sentence. 

If you compare languages, it should be in an analogue kind of situation.

Essential seems to be the amount of transmitted information, too. 
I think, there is a tendency to shorten all things not neccessary to transmit information until the process has too many failures.

For example, compare the length of reading the same fairy tale in different languages. 

Best regards
Bernd


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## PhilFrEn

Hutschi said:


> Hi, Phil,
> 
> could you do me the favour and tell me the name of this German who does this  ? There are a lot of letters dropped or at least weakened, and it depends on the region, what is said.



Hi here Hutschi 

I said that as a global comparison with French .

By the way, what I heard, is that in Northen Germany here, German (language) is "better" (I don't want to chock German speakers, I just say what german from here are saying ). 
While going down to the South, german is shifted (the smooth "ch" becomes a clear "sch", "g" goes back from the sound "ch" to "k" (for instance in number "zwanzig")) etc.


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## Little_Little

PhilFrEn said:


> Hi here Hutschi
> 
> I said that as a global comparison with French .
> 
> By the way, what I heard, is that in Northen Germany here, German (language) is "better" (I don't want to chock German speakers, I just say what german from here are saying ).
> While going down to the South, german is shifted (the smooth "ch" becomes a clear "sch", "g" goes back from the sound "ch" to "k" (for instance in number "zwanzig")) etc.


 
Yes, I agree with you, I'm living in Stuttgart and this Schäbisch dialect is driving me crazy... And yes, they use much more the sound sch...


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## Hutschi

PhilFrEn said:


> Hi here Hutschi
> [...]
> By the way, what I heard, is that in Northen Germany here, German (language) is "better" (I don't want to chock German speakers, I just say what german from here are saying ).


 

That is a bit of what I meant. In the North, they learned the standard language as foreign language. They did not speak High German but Low German, some centuries ago many of them transferred to High German. So they learned a lot by reading books - and books became the standard reference. This may be a reason why they are speaking "better". The most of them consider their local Low German language (which is more similar to English and Dutch than High German) as bad. 

I think, if we compare the speed, truly we must define, what we mean. 

If you speak more syllables, you need more redundancy. 

If you reduce redundancy, you have to speak slower. 

This seems to be a rule of thumb.

Best regards
from Hutschi 
in Dresden


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## Venezuelan_sweetie

PhilFrEn said:


> What I can realise, is that we speak quite fast in France. When you take a nomal sentence, we "eat" words, shorter often them and so on.
> 
> Example:
> _- I call you tomorrow to give my adress, so that we can meet each other and talk!_
> _- J't'appelle (je t'a...) demain pour t'donner (te donner...) mon adresse, comme ca on peut s'rencontrer et parler!_
> 
> I want to insist on word linking. We have the bad habit to link them (when it is not already a rule like "_des avions" _("s-a" is prononced "za")). With feedback of my German girlfriend, it is really hard for her to get what I say when I speak with my parents on the phone for instance (ok it depends also on the hability in the language of the person, for sure).
> 
> Furtherthemore, we don't say 100% of a word, we skipped systematically the letters at the end (example: auparavan(t) / boît(e)...). I can understand somebody who is throwing up each time he tries to learn French (while dealing also with our horrible grammar). By the way, we also use "horrible" in French, but of course as good French, the "h" is not said .
> 
> Everything to say that we have a nice language in my opinion, quite rich, but somehow this problem of not saying the "complete" word, causes me problem to write sometime, especially for grammar when I don't know if I have to put a "s", a "t", a "e", "nothing" etc.


 
Thank heaven!!!  Now I know I'm not crazy, and my IC is not abnormally low...!   

I love the French language.  Nevertheless, it seems like I can't ever get going in my learning proccess!  I can somewhat understand written/spoken French, but when it comes to spelling/pronouncing... ah, that's another story!

A Frenchman friend of mine always says to me: "Go ahead, brag about you being able to read French and understand a few words... but when it comes to you Vénézuelian people speak with us, you are swimming in the ocean!"

I guess he's right...


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## Venezuelan_sweetie

Oh, I forgot to say...

Here in Venezuela, you can find the most diverse rythms within spoken Spanish.  People from the East coast speak incredibly fast (they sound like a machine-gun!), people from the South side speak in a somewhat slurred way, people from the Center speak in a sing-a-song manner, people from the West coast do not speak -they shout-, and us Northerns... well, we have our own dialect.

I (personally) am a fast speaker.  That, in addition of the low volume I use and my Brit-French-Brazili-American version of the "Caraqueño" dialect, makes it a real challenge for people to understand my Spanish.

Hummm... Perhaps that's why I'd rather speak English, no matter where the listener comes from...


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## dificilima

I find that any new language sounds fast when I first learn it.  It's only with time and practice that I learn to "hear" the words and follow what is said more easily.  Having said that, however, I also agree that some regional accents are faster than others.  Not sure if you can say that about entire languages though. 

I have also heard people claim that certain languages are just louder than others.  I find it rather racist, but admit that certain groups of people do take up more air space when they are having a discussion.  I suppose part of that is also related to the fact that interruptions and parallel conversations are more accepted in some cultures.


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## charkshark

Swedish is spoken quite fast to my standards, I find it hard to keep up when speaking. Hebrew is also quick to my standards (about as fast as I can go ususally) though it usually varies person to person like english. Norwegian is probably faster than Swedish in most situations.

I think spanish is (sometimes) quite slow, especially mexican spanish. I find Spain-Spanish to be (usually) quite a bit faster.


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## caballoschica

Spanish Spanish is definitely faster than Mexican and I_n General, _Latin American Spanish.  I don't know about the particular dialectical speeds of Spanish, but I can certainly tell you the difference between Nicaraguan Spanish and Spanish Spanish.  My Nicaraguan professor spoke relatively slowly.  My Spanish professor held herself back at the beginning of the year and now she speaks incredibly fast.  I can barely keep up, but it has helped me tremendously with my comprehension of spoken Spanish.   Oh, and I would think that Andalusian Spanish is a bit faster than some Spanishes because of its dropped letters.  Instead of the "ado" ending, they say "ao." Me he comprao un vestio colorao=Me he comprado un vestido colorado. I'm forgetting what else is different in their dialect. 

As far as English goes: New York and Texas.  Fast v Slow, in general.


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## jmx

caballoschica said:


> Oh, and I would think that Andalusian Spanish is a bit faster than some Spanishes because of its dropped letters. Instead of the "ado" ending, they say "ao." Me he comprao un vestio colorao=Me he comprado un vestido colorado. I'm forgetting what else is different in their dialect.


It's true that, compared to northern dialects, Andalusian omits a lot of sounds. In general the number of omissions or 'elisions' increases as one travels from north to south in the peninsula. But the exact example that you have given isn't very good : the elision of 'd' in the -ado ending is common to *all* dialects of peninsular Spanish.


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## Alxmrphi

I think there are quite a lot of Irish people that can speak more than twice as a fast as we English do, not as a Joke.

I've been in MANY siutations with Irish people (which is also my heritage) where I have had to pick out every 3rd or 4th word and create the sentence in my head to be polite because they're speaking so fast I, as a native speaker in my own native language, cannot understand them.


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## Chaska Ñawi

Moderator Note:  The forero who started this thread made this request:



> I wonder if anybody has any objective information on the rapidity of speech in different languages, since subjective impressions are highly unrelible.



So far we have had very few posts that contained objective information, and many purely subjective posts that were thinly disguised chat.

The thread will stay open only if further posts adhere to the original request.  Thank you for your understanding.


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## brighton rock

I think english is spoken slower than latin languages in every case (nothing to do with towns or cities), and this is because the languages that come from nordic people (Swedish, German, English) are much more simple than the latin ones (shorter words, fewer rules).

I am studing french and i can assure you, i'm having a very hard time trying to understand films


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## Hutschi

Hi, I hope this is not off topic. I found that the rapidity of English seems to become faster in time, especially in films.
The speed seems to increase and many of the words are not spoken clearly anymore. 

I found this, when watching DVDs from the long running Doctor Who series. The speed of speaking increased much during the last 45 years in this series.

If a language becomes faster, the relation to other languages changes, too.

*Objective measurings*

In http://www.phonetik.uni-muenchen.de/FIPKM/vol38/f38_hp_1.pdf 
(Phonetische Analyse der Sprechgeschwindigkeit, Hartmut R. Pfitzinger)​you can find a lot of measures and a lot of principles. However, the article is mostly in German. It gives you results in the German language. It has included a list of literature. 

The original poster (fobits) wrote: _



This feature of the language allows Spanish speakers to comfortably speak at nearly twice the rate of English.

Click to expand...

_ 
What is the definition? What do we measure?

There is no agreement. According to Hartmut R. Pfitzinger there are three kinds of rates: 1. word rates, 2. syllable rates, 3. phone rates.  
You can take each of this to measure objective. 
Another rate could be "contents rate" (this is not discussed in the source I gave).

You can find diagrams there with measurement for different speakers of German language in different situations.


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## mally pense

> I found this, when watching DVDs from the long running Doctor Who series. The speed of speaking increased much during the last 45 years in this series.


 
I very much doubt that this reflects a trend in the overall population. It's far more likely to reflect changes in programming style, e.g. from an era when even in the making of entertainment programs for TV there was a tendency for people to think people on TV had to speak 'properly' to today when it's perhaps thought better for people to speak more realistically (or at least what's perceived by the program makers and actors (of both sexes) as being more realistic.

There's also the fact that at least one of the Doctors in times past was noted for his deliberate and careful enunciation. I was going to say 'slow' but that's perhaps a subjective opinion so I won't


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## Hutschi

mally pense said:


> I very much doubt that this reflects a trend in the overall population. It's far more likely to reflect changes in programming style, e.g. from an era when even in the making of entertainment programs for TV there was a tendency for people to think people on TV had to speak 'properly' to today when it's perhaps thought better for people to speak more realistically (or at least what's perceived by the program makers and actors (of both sexes) as being more realistic.
> 
> There's also the fact that at least one of the Doctors in times past was noted for his deliberate and careful enunciation. I was going to say 'slow' but that's perhaps a subjective opinion so I won't


 
This gives a hint, that the rapidity of speech also depends strongly on the purpose and on the situation. 

So we can only compare if there are similar situations.

I have a question: Do we measure the content rate, too, when we speak of Rapidity of Speech?


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## mally pense

> I have a question: Do we measure the content rate, too, when we speak of Rapidity of Speech?


 
I don't know, except that I thought I saw something related to that in one of the previous posts perhaps? I can't help feeling however that if we're to remain strictly to the guideline of only looking for objective information there will be very little left for us to discuss.


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## Hutschi

This is right. We can only give hints.

The CSS definition gives following rates:
http://webdesign.about.com/od/styleproperties/p/blspspeechrate.htm



> slow 120 words per minute.
> medium 120-200 words per minute.
> fast 300 words per minute.
> x-fast 500 words per minute.


This gives you some objective data you can use to compare.

In this sense, the speed of different languages would depend on the word rate rather than phone rate. The number of Syllables per second will increase with the number of syllables, if the word rate is constant.


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## Perico Nuevo

All I know is, I'm fluent in Spanish and I have a beginner understanding of French, but already French seems much slower/ generally easier to understand!


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## Brioche

mally pense said:


> _I found this, when watching DVDs from the long running Doctor Who series. The speed of speaking increased much during the last 45 years in this series._
> 
> I very much doubt that this reflects a trend in the overall population. It's far more likely to reflect changes in programming style, e.g. from an era when even in the making of entertainment programs for TV there was a tendency for people to think people on TV had to speak 'properly' to today when it's perhaps thought better for people to speak more realistically (or at least what's perceived by the program makers and actors (of both sexes) as being more realistic.



I wonder whether it has something to do with the improvement in technology. The quality of speakers in modern TVs far outstrips the tinny tannoys of the 50s. May be the slower, more careful speech on TV 45 years ago was necessary for understanding.


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## Last10words

In Chile we speak rather fast, but we also tend to elide final esses, "S" and dees "D" near  the end. Former president Frei Ruiz-Tagle was quite notorious in this aspect. To our ear it seems like an over enunciation. 

"Lo chileno son mal hablaoh, nunca pronuncian la ese finale"


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## kinia22

It's really difficult to understand what sb wants to say when he is talking fast. I have learned English since my childhood and even now have problems with people who talk really fast....


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## mally pense

> I wonder whether it has something to do with the improvement in technology. The quality of speakers in modern TVs far outstrips the tinny tannoys of the 50s. May be the slower, more careful speech on TV 45 years ago was necessary for understanding.


 
It looks like we've drifted into 'rapidity of speech in different eras' (as opposed to in different _languages_) but actually - while this sub-topic is still alive, let me just say that I doubt it for a few reasons:

1. I very much doubt it would have occurred to the TV producers there that was some sort of need to speak slower because of the limitations of the technology (which were just as 'cutting edge' then as they are now).

2. I very much doubt speakers of that era were as bad as you are imagining or remembering them to be, certainly not so 'bad' as to make comprehension significantly more difficult.

3. Dr Who started in the 60's not the 50's (though this is just splitting hairs)

4. I really do think it was a part of TV culture at the time that people on radio and TV were expected to speak 'properly', and I'm really sure this is the true explanation.

These are mostly just personal opinions though, and maybe in any case we should be focussing on the primary topic (or start a new thread).


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## Hutschi

> *Christian Morgenstern*
> *Geburtsakt der Philosophie*
> 
> *Erschrocken schaut der Heide Schaf mich an,*
> *als säh's in mir den ersten Menschenmann.*
> *Sein Blick steckt an; wir stehen wie im Schlaf;*
> *mir ist, ich säh zum ersten Mal ein Schaf. *





> *Christian Morgenstern*
> *Birth of Philosophy*
> 
> *The heath sheep glares at me with frightened awe*
> *as though I were the first of men it saw.*
> *Contagious glare! We stand as though asleep;*
> *it seems the first time that I see a sheep. *


Source:
http://www.alb-neckar-schwarzwald.de/morgenstern/morgenstern_poems.html

(The Morgenstern poetry is in the public domain, and I apologize to publish more than three lines here, but I need a text to compare. If not written as poem, the amount of text would fit. The translation of Max Knight is cited from: The Gallows Songs, Christian Morgenstern's Galgenlieder, A Selection Translated, with an Introduction, by Max Knight University of California Press 1964. © 1963 by Max E. Knight)

I measured the time it took me to read the texts:

German version: 15 s
English version: 17 s

This is my result. The measurement may differ by +/- 1 s, but in the same direction. 

I am not a native speaker of English.
But may be, you can repeat the experiment.

Hutschi


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## mally pense

Interesting - I spoke the English text just a little faster than you, but I was conscious while doing so that I was making a deliberate decision as to the pace at which I read it. I could if I chose, read it at double the pace - though it would sound rather rushed!

But this got me wondering about a different aspect to the rapidity of speaking in different languages:

Individuals to some degree have some control over their individual 'rapidity', and while there may be cultural/regional differences in the range of speeds which are considered normal, the speed may also vary involuntarily depending on mood (e.g. faster when angry or agitated perhaps). The question I now ask is this (and apologies if it as been asked or covered already):

What are the *limiting factors* in how fast a particular language can be spoken? Does _this_ vary from language to language, e.g. due to the physical characteristics of how the mouth muscles must respond to enunciate the consecutive phonemes, or are all languages the same in this respect?


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## Hutschi

Hi, I tried again, but now to speak as fast as I could without special training and without missing syllables and making errors:

German: 8 s
English: 12 s (non-native)


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## Hutschi

mally pense said:


> What are the *limiting factors* in how fast a particular language can be spoken? Does _this_ vary from language to language, e.g. due to the physical characteristics of how the mouth muscles must respond to enunciate the consecutive phonemes, or are all languages the same in this respect?


 
I think, the principles are the same. But indeed, it seems that there are differences. Example: If you have long and short vowels, you have to keep the contrast or replace it by lax and tense or something similar. But I'm not sure what influence this has to the speed.

I think, limiting factors are:

1. Do you want just to speak as fast as you can or do you want to give information?
2. Do you want to speak correctly or are there allowed errors?
3. Are you reasoning while speaking or do you just utter words?

If you speak faster, the relative lenght of phons changes. Measurements show that it is not just a compression. 

I think, many languages have the concept of tongue twisters. You have to speak them as fast as you can, starting slow, becoming faster and faster. At the end, you cannot speak them, because the synchronization fails between what you want to say and what you actually say.

I want to do some more measurement, but I am not a professional at this area. For example, you can view diagrams with actually spoken words in sound programs.


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