It is said that Italians speak the fastest in the world. Saying up to 9 syllables per second. Even in Europe, there is a big difference in the speed of speaking with 5-6 syllables per second for Germans. However, research has shown that the information transmission speed of any language converges at about 39 bps per second, which is twice that of Morse.
In this study, 17 languages were surveyed in 9 languages. For Indo-European languages, English and French, German, Italian, Spanish, Catalan, Serbian and Basque. The Ural languages are Finnish and Hungarian, the Turg are Turkish, the Thais are Thai, the Ostro Asians are Vietnamese, the Sina Tibetans are Mandarin, Cantonese, Koreans are Korean, and the Japanese are Japanese.
In the study, a sample sentence written for each language was prepared to determine how long it took to speak the sentence in 17 languages and asked the subjects to read it. Information transmission density is calculated by calculating speed and language information density.
As mentioned earlier, speaking speeds are very different, but the density of information by language is also 4.8 bits per syllable in Basque, while 8 bits per syllable in Vietnamese. However, in the end, any language converged to a transfer rate of 39.15 bits per second. For reference, the initial modem transmission speed was 110bps, and today the Internet’s information transmission speed averages over 100Mbps.
The research team points out that until now, language science has focused on the complexity of grammar, but overlooked the rate of information transmission. This study predicted that any language showed similar information transmission speed, and if it exceeds that, it may be because the brain may feel a bottleneck. People have interpreted that the bottleneck is not the part of listening to the voice, but because of the stage of organizing the thoughts, as there is no difficulty in understanding even when listening to the sound at 120% speed. Related information can be found here .