Key points from the chart
- The left panel shows how many syllables per second people speak in 14 languages. Japanese and Spanish are the fastest, Thai and Vietnamese the slowest.
- The right panel shows information rate in bits per second. Here the curves bunch together, so the speed gaps largely disappear.
- The study behind the chart found an average information rate of 39.15 bits per second across 17 languages [2].
- Languages that pack more information into each syllable are spoken more slowly, and languages with less information per syllable are spoken faster [2].
- The chart prints no numbers for each language. The figures in the table below are averages we calculated from the authors’ published data [3].
The chart in text
Title: Say no more. Subtitle: Syllable rate and information rate in selected languages. Two side by side panels of curves, one row per language, in this order from top to bottom: Japanese, Spanish, Finnish, Italian, Korean, Turkish, French, English, German, Hungarian, Mandarin, Cantonese, Vietnamese, Thai.
- Left panel, dark blue: Syllables per second, axis marked 4, 6 and 8, with the note “Speak more quickly” and an arrow pointing right.
- Right panel, light blue: Information rate, bits per second, axis marked 30, 40, 50 and 60, with the note “Convey information more quickly” and an arrow pointing right.
- Source line: “Different languages, similar encoding efficiency: Comparable information rates across the human communicative niche” by Christophe Coupé, Yoon Mi Oh, Dan Dediu and François Pellegrino, Science Advances (2019). Credit: The Economist.
Each curve shows the spread of measurements for that language. A tall narrow hump means speakers were similar to each other, a low wide one means they varied a lot. Average values per language, calculated from the study’s open dataset [3]:
| Language (chart order) | Syllables per second | Information rate, bits per second | Information per syllable, bits |
|---|---|---|---|
| Japanese | 8.03 | 40.4 | 5.03 |
| Spanish | 7.73 | 42.0 | 5.43 |
| Finnish | 7.17 | 39.4 | 5.49 |
| Italian | 7.16 | 37.9 | 5.29 |
| Korean | 7.12 | 39.6 | 5.56 |
| Turkish | 7.05 | 37.6 | 5.34 |
| French | 6.88 | 45.9 | 6.68 |
| English | 6.34 | 44.9 | 7.09 |
| German | 6.09 | 37.0 | 6.08 |
| Hungarian | 5.87 | 34.6 | 5.90 |
| Mandarin | 5.86 | 40.8 | 6.96 |
| Cantonese | 5.57 | 36.4 | 6.53 |
| Vietnamese | 5.30 | 42.5 | 8.02 |
| Thai | 4.70 | 33.8 | 7.19 |
How the study measured speed and information
The researchers recorded 170 native adult speakers, 10 per language, each reading the same set of 15 short texts aloud at a normal pace, about 240,000 syllables in total [2]. Speech rate is syllables spoken per second. Information density was worked out separately from large written corpora for each language, as the average information carried by a syllable given the one before it [2]. Multiplying the two gives an information rate for every reading.
Across all speakers the mean speech rate was 6.63 syllables per second and the mean information rate 39.15 bits per second [2]. Individual speakers ranged from about 4.3 to 9.1 syllables per second, while information per syllable ranged from 4.8 bits in Basque to 8.0 bits in Vietnamese [2]. The authors found a clear negative link between the two (Pearson’s r of minus 0.71): the denser the syllables, the slower the speech [2].
The Economist summed up the result: a Japanese version of a text would be longer and a Thai one shorter, yet people reading either aloud, or the English original, would finish at roughly the same time [1].
Why the curves line up
Japanese has around 25 phonemes and only a few hundred distinct syllables, while English has almost 7,000 distinct syllables, and tonal languages such as Thai, Vietnamese and Cantonese add tones on top [2]. Fewer possible syllables means each one carries less information, so speakers produce more of them per second. The authors suggest the shared rate of about 39 bits per second reflects limits in how fast people can process speech, rather than anything about a particular culture [2].
Notes on this infographic
- The chart shows 14 of the 17 languages in the study. Basque, Catalan and Serbian were also measured but are not drawn [2][3].
- No values are printed on the chart. Our table is a plain average of every reading in the published dataset, so it can differ slightly from the authors’ statistical model, which also adjusts for speaker and text [2][3].
- “Information” here is a measure from information theory, how predictable each syllable is, not meaning. Two languages with the same bits per second are not shown to say the same amount of content.
- The recordings are of people reading prepared texts, not natural conversation [2].
Questions about syllable rate and information rate
What language has the highest information density?
Among the 17 languages studied, Vietnamese had the highest information density at about 8.0 bits per syllable and Basque the lowest at about 4.8 bits [2]. Vietnamese is also one of the slowest spoken, at about 5.3 syllables per second in the published data [3].
Which language is spoken the fastest?
In this study Japanese was the fastest, averaging about 8.0 syllables per second, followed by Spanish at about 7.7 [3]. Thai was the slowest at about 4.7. Once information per syllable is taken into account, the information rates are much closer, from about 34 to 46 bits per second [3].
What is the average information rate of human speech?
The study behind the chart found an average information rate of 39.15 bits per second across 17 languages [2]. The mean speech rate across all speakers was 6.63 syllables per second [2]. The researchers recorded 170 native adult speakers, 10 per language, each reading the same set of 15 short texts aloud at a normal pace [2]. "Information" here is a measure of how predictable each syllable is, not of meaning.
Why do some languages sound faster than others?
Languages with fewer possible syllables, such as Japanese with only a few hundred distinct syllables, carry less information in each syllable, so speakers produce more syllables per second [2]. English, by contrast, has almost 7,000 distinct syllables [2]. The authors found a clear negative link between the two, with a Pearson's r of minus 0.71: the denser the syllables, the slower the speech [2].
Sources
- The Economist, Why are some languages spoken faster than others?, Graphic detail, 28 September 2019 (opened via an Internet Archive capture of 25 February 2021).
- Coupé C, Oh YM, Dediu D, Pellegrino F, Different languages, similar encoding efficiency: Comparable information rates across the human communicative niche, Science Advances 5(9), 2019 (open access full text via PubMed Central; journal page doi 10.1126/sciadv.aaw2594).
- Coupé et al., SupplMatInfoRate, supplementary data and code (InfoRateData.csv), GitHub. Averages per language calculated by us.
Last reviewed 30 October 2026
