The other day I was watching a  telenovella, and it got me wondering.

What is the fastest spoken language in the world? Well according to a study published in 2019, there are at least two different  answers to that question, depending on what you actually care about. [♪INTRO] Okay let’s get this out of  the way right at the top.

Obviously, individual people have  different normal speaking rates. I mean, have you met Hank? I don’t speak as fast as that  guy on my most caffeinated days.

And then there’s the fact  that different accents within the same language are spoken at different rates. Yeah, there’s actually research that shows that, on average, a US Southern accent  is slower than northern ones. So to find the fastest spoken language, you’ve gotta recruit a bunch of people for at least as many languages  as you can account for.

In the study we’re talking about here, the researchers targeted 17 languages. Which is tiny compared to  the total number of languages that exist in the world, but together  they cover over 3 billion humans, and nine different language families. They even included Basque, which isn’t related to any  other language on the planet!

Then, they recruited native  speakers of each language, had them read out translated  versions of the same set of messages, and kept track of both how long it took them, and how many syllables they spoke. Here is one of those example messages: “Last night I opened the  front door to let the cat out. It was such a beautiful evening that I wandered down the garden for a breath of fresh air.

Then I heard a click as the door closed behind me. I realised I'd locked myself out. To cap it all, I was arrested while  I was trying to force the door open!” So, how’d I score?

Well… I don’t know if that’s good or bad. Okay now let’s cut to SciShow’s own Hiroka Matsushima, who’ll read the same message, but in Japanese: 昨夜、猫を外に出してやろうと玄関を開けたら、 とても気持のいい夜だった。新鮮な空 気を吸おうと、 僕も庭へ出てみると、 背後でドアの閉まるカチッと言う音が聞こえ、 締め出 されてしまった。挙句の果てに、 ドアをこじ開けようとしているところを逮捕されてしまっ た。 Now this was just a demo of the experiment, and not of the results. Because again, we’re just  two individuals providing one point of data for each language.

But by doing this over and  over, with 170 different people, the team concluded that, on average, Spanish really is spoken faster than English: Spanish clocked in 8 syllables per second, compared to English’s 6 syllables per second.. In fact, Spanish had the  study’s second-highest speed, beaten only by Japanese. But here’s the thing: the goal of the study wasn’t actually to work out which  language is spoken the fastest.

Instead, it was to find out which language has the highest information rate. And to find that, the researchers needed to work out how information dense each language is. In other words, how much information  does each syllable convey?

Again, on average. Take the Spanish word ‘nerviosa’. It means the same thing as “nervous”,  but has twice as many syllables.

So the ‘information per syllable’ in  ‘nerviosa’ is half that of ‘nervous’. But Spanish can also say the same thing as English using fewer syllables. Instead of, “You’re going too  far”, you can just say “Te pasas!” So to rigorously compare the information density of all their languages, the research team turned to an old idea from the founder of the information age, Claude Shannon.

In the 1940s, he invented what’s  now called the Shannon entropy, which measures the capacity  something has to surprise you. Back in the 50s, he even tried  to measure the value for English! And these days, it’s used  all over science and math.

Like, a dice roll has more  possible outcomes than a coin toss, so dice roll results are more  surprising than coin tosses, and a dice roll’s Shannon  entropy is a larger number. The researchers behind our  2019 paper calculated both a language’s Shannon entropy,  plus a slightly modified version called the ‘second-order’ Shannon entropy. And to get a value for that,  you have to calculate how easy it is to guess the  next syllable in a language.

And as a side note: if this sounds  familiar, it might be because it’s related to how Large Language Models work. Once the team did a bunch of math  using this fun-looking equation, they were able to produce an  information density for each language. But again, they were looking at spoken languages, and speaking a language requires saying a bunch of syllables over time, so they also did some math to get the information rate.

And yes, you can think of it as a bit rate like when you’re trying to transfer data on a computer. When we look at Spanish versus English, we find that both rates are roughly the same. Around 43 bits per second.

So on average, Spanish needs more syllables to convey the same information that English does. But since Spanish also gets syllables out quicker, ideas are conveyed in the same amount of time. But to find out which language’s  bit rate came out on top, first, you have to make it through this ad.

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You’ll also get 20% off an  annual premium subscription. There are, of course, still some  caveats to this study’s findings. For one thing, the translations  the participants read could never be 100% identical in terms of  what information was conveyed.

Like, French words for  professions always convey gender, and Japanese honorifics denote  relations in a way English just can’t. That context often gets lost in translation. So you can never say exactly  how much information a syllable contains in one language, compared  to its direct translation in another.

But despite the limitations,  the team found a pattern across the 17 languages they investigated: faster-spoken languages tend to carry less  information per syllable. That averaged out to the  information rate across each language being roughly the  same: 39 bits per second. If you are desperate to crown a winner, French had the highest average information rate, at around 45 bits per second.

Meanwhile, languages like  German, Hungarian, and Thai would come in near the bottom  of the proverbial leaderboard. But really, the headline  coming out of this research is that no matter what language  you speak, it seems you convey information at approximately the same rate. Which kinda hints that  something deeper is going on.

The researchers speculated that it has something to do with how brains process information. There’s probably a limit to  how fast brains can consider information in spoken words, which means you can’t speak quickly when the  information content is too dense. But speaking too slowly, or having too  little information in each syllable, isn’t good either, because then a listener would have to store too much information in working memory for too long  while you finish your point.

This hypothesis seems to be backed by a new study published in the journal Neuron. Its authors looked beyond mere speaking, comparing bit rates calculated  for a range of activities, from reading, to typing, to playing video games. They noted that our brains  process information during these various activities at a rate  between five and 50 bits per second.

Which is only a rough  estimate, but the main takeaway was how narrow the range turned out to be. They also speculated that  this rate could be deeply hard-wired into how our  neurons function, constraining everything we do, including  speaking and listening. Whatever the answer, scientists  are still working on it.

That 2019 paper left a lot of  major languages out, after all. And over the years, other papers have both supported and challenged its results. So if you’re a French speaker,  you might want to hold off before you purchase that “Fastest  Conveyer of Information” trophy. [♪OUTRO]