Speakers of foreign languages

[GMH]

Why do speakers of foreign languages sound as if they are speaking so fast that they could speak about 300 words a minute? An average English speaker doesn't seem to speak as fast as most foreign language speakers.

I have been listening to a number of foreign language radio stations on the Internet, where languages other than English are spoken and I have noticed that in many languages including Danish and Dutch they seem to be breaking the world record for how many words they say! It sounds so fast!

[CLOWN TICKLE]

There is a difference between romantuc language, french, spanish italian which is fast abd germanic such as ours, german etc which isnt

[heathfield]

When you're listening to English you seem to hear the words as whole words, 'cos you've become used to hearing them. The brain encounters a first syllable, anticipates the next from a small set of known alternatives, confirms what is is, and does the same with subsequent syllables. It's a fast process. Listening to foreign languages, you tend to be more aware of the syllables individually, 'cos your brain is having to concentrate more on each unfamiliar one and is trying, (and failing), to string them together into something that makes sense. You can see how this will slow things up, and before the brain has decided it can't find a match to provide any meaning, the next syllable is already arriving. Thus it appears that they're jabbering nineteen to the dozen. (And this same process happens when someone speaking in English says an unfamiliar word, and your response is, "Eh? What?").

[SaxyJag]

I can understand some French, and they don't seem to speak too quickly, generally, but when I learnt some Italian, our teacher told us that Italians do indeed speak very quickly. She's fluent and married to an Italian and still says this. She also says that the Italians' national 'psyche' seems to match, although they've always seemed a very laid-back lot to me.

Yet Russians are incredibly laid-back, but their native speech doesn't seem to match.

What is interesting is that, where I live, we have a great number of Gujarati, Hindi, Punjabi and Urdu speakers, all of whom, naturally, seem to speak very quickly in their mother tongue. Yet when they speak English (often very well), then that's fast too.

[Calvesy]

A language you don't know will just sound like a rapid fire of unfamiliar syllables. English, however, unlike languages from cultures where the pace of life has always been slower, has most of the common concepts represented by words of one syllable. So if your idea is small, you can get it across quickly. This does represent a problem for people who only ever have a small number of very simple thoughts to convey, so they have to pad out their sentences to make themselves feel that they have said more.

"Oh my God, actually, you know, at the end of the day, sort of like, innit? Know what I mean?"

Compare speed-limit with geschwindigkeitsbegrenzung, heart with corazon, miss with madamoiselle, ninety-one with quatre-vingts-et-onze, Sarge with ubergruppenfuhrer, I with watashiwa, bit with bontichbonteuch, cheers with nastroviya, yes with ita vero, no with ei ole, tape deck with magnetophone or tonbandgerat.

As for Danish and Dutch, you happen to have chosen as your example the two languages from which Anglo Saxon English is most directly related. All of our small words like man, can, hand, god, will, house, fly, shoe, bid, see, all, finger, ice, go, are, out, dead are almost exactly the same, just that we've got a funny accent!

[Octavius]

I have many many many relatives who live in County Cork in Ireland, they all speak English but sound as if they are going 100 miles an hour. We often never understand each other as they think that I (we) speak too fast as well.

[DaSwede]

Good explanation there, heathfield.

Swedish is slow, GMH. Slow and mighty like a fat man dancing. A beautiful language, as is yours.

[beejaybee]

North & south Welsh speakers are the same. Even though it`s the same language we very often don`t understand all each other is saying.