Tempo of Different Languages

Languages vary in their tempo. Certain languages are spoken more quickly than others. Researchers from the University of Lyon asked 59 native speakers to read the following passage in their own language: "Last night I opened the front door to let the cat out. It was such a beautiful night that I wandered down to the garden to get a breath of fresh air. Then I heard a click as the door closed behind me."

Researchers calculated the average number of syllables spoken per second. Here are the results for Chinese (Mandarin), English, Japanese and Spanish:

Syllables per second:

Japanese 7.84
Spanish   7.82
English    6.19
Chinese   5.18

Of these four languages, the one with the highest number of syllables per second was Japanese. The one with the lowest number was Chinese. Spanish placed a close second behind Japanese.

The language with the highest number of syllables per second, Japanese, is a language in which each syllable tends to convey little information. The reason is that Japanese words often have many syllables. In contrast, Chinese syllables convey more information because Chinese is a tone language and many words are monosyllabic. The research appears to indicate that languages with syllables which contain a significant amount of information tend to be spoken more slowly than languages with syllables which convey less information.