It's fascinating that while languages vary wildly by speaking speed, information transfer is fairly similar.

Poor Thai down there at the bottom, speaking slowly and transferring information slowly.

Thai, the PNY USB stick of languages, apparently.

This was one of the weirdest things I had to learn when I was learning spanish. The sounds are much faster but the information density was similar. For me as an english native speaker it felt like I was listening to a machine gun at first. Eventually I trained my ear and now both languages sound the same speed.

I am pretty skeptical about these results in general. I would like to see the original research paper, but they usually

1. write the text to be read in English, then translate them into the target languages.
2. recurit test participants from US western university campuses.

And then there's the question of how do you measure the amount of information conveyed in natural languages using bits...

Yeah, the results are mostly likely very skewed.

In Finnish, I can simply ask, "Juoksenneltaisiinko?" whereas in English, I have to say, "Should we run around aimlessly?"

So if I'm reading this right, French (closely followed by English) tends to convey the most info per unit time?

What produces the stretched graphs like Italian and German? What do these humps mean?

Inaccurate for Italian because 50% of the language is conveyed by auditory volume, hand gestures and body language .... and espresso, lots and lots of espresso.

Turkish is also inaccurate because 25% of the language is in the eyes .... those intense eyes where you can't tell if someone is excited, energetic, full of life or psychotic / murderous.

As someone who speaks both French and English, I'm surprised to see French as leading "information density" language. Most French terms have been incorporated into English. Language tends to be behind on technology terms. Language doesn't have any noticeable difference in short syllable common words to English. It also seems to me that French speakers have an easier time in being vague. I have the impression that English is more precise.

Cowards left out Navajo.

Yeah but 30% of the information in French are the "uhhh's" lmao

Speaking of "data is beautiful", IMO a 2D scatter plot would be very useful for visualizing this relationship. This chart does provide the distribution for each language, as opposed to just the average, but at the expense of making correlation (or lack thereof) difficult to see.

Also, the ratio of the largest to the smallest value for syllables per second and for bits per second appears to be fairly similar. I have to eyeball values but it looks like Japanese : Thai is 8.0 : 4.7 for syllables per second (so 1.7) whereas French : Thai is 48 : 34 (so 1.4) for bits per second.

For each language, the distribution of syllable rate looks very much like the distribution of bit rate. I would like to see a chart of bits per syllable. Oh, and I wonder how this affects reading speed and the rate of information transfer via reading, especially for different spoken languages that use similar written characters.

The French/English/German curves are interesting, given the relationships between them.

I wonder if this implies English has more in common with French than German.

Or how the German and Italian curves are so similar, does that reflect a similarity in language or in how it's used (cultural)?

I always thought that English was an efficient language.

I would imagine this is because there is a 'comfortable' rate of information exchange in human conversation, and so each given language will be spoken at a pace that achieves this comfortable rate.

So it's not that the syllable rate coincidentally results in the same information rate, but the opposite - the syllable rate adjusts to match the desired information rate.

Wonder how Thai is the zipfile of languages.

I’d like a visual of how much unnecessary elaboration different languages commonly use to make a point.
Though you can elaborate excessively for fun, how much is common?
And on the other end of the scale text speak is often extremely concise (not me tho ha). Would be cool to see and compare the limits.

Turkish seems inefficient. You spend the effort to talk quickly but don't get the reward of high info transfer speed like Spanish.

Wollen sie etwa behaupten, die Informationsübermittlungsgeschwindigkeit der deutschen Sprache sei unterdurchschnittlich? So eine Unverschämtheit!

Thai is so efficient

English is pictured as such a smooth, almost perfectly normalized bell curve. On one hand it's such a versatile language that (largely due to colonialism) has undergone so much evolution and mixing with other languages that I can believe that. On the other hand it looks almost too normal. Odd.

It's long been suspected that Koreans are really fast with rhythm games and have high APM because of their language getting to the point faster.

That was the issue I had with my elementary school spanish teacher. He spoke so fast that you just couldn't latch onto anything. It just sounded like DDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDS aqui. DDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDRS agostos.

Italian has a wildly different set than everyone else pretty much.

I am curious about Arabic. I feel like it should be having the highest information rate.

So Thai is the current meta

Syllables can vary in length. Japanese has very short syllables while English has rather long ones. Counting phonemes would make more sense

The graph is missing languages such as Portuguese and Arabic.