Sorry, but this is nonsense. There's actual research on how fast-spoken languages are. In reality, the top 10 are 1. Japanese 2. Spanish 3. Basque 4. Finnish 5. Italian 6. Serbian 7. Korean 8. Catalan 9. Turkish 10. French The Economist had a recent article on this. The research is by Coupé et al. (2019), published in Science Advances.
@@jonasholmqvist5231 what is the sample size of these studies? Are the Dravidian languages even included? In fact, I would argue the fastest language is Malayalam
@@SuhbanIo The researchers only studied 17 languages, so The Economist was wrong to claim they are the fastest - although it still disproves this video. Here is the relevant paragraphs on methodology from the research article: We studied a sample of 17languages from 9 language families spread across Europe and Asia, showing a remarkable diversity in terms of linguistic and typological features at all levels, from phonetics and phonology to morphology and syntax and to semantics and prag- matics (see table S1). Focusing on their phonetics and phonology, these languages vary in their number of phonemes (from 25 in Japanese and Spanish to more than 40 in English and Thai), the number of distinct syllables (from a few hundred in Japanese to almost 7000 in English), tonal complexity (from none to six contrastive tones), and various otherphonological phenomena (e.g., vowel harmony is present in Finnish, Hungarian, Korean, and Turkish). Thanks to its size and diversity, this sample is adequate to reveal robust trends reflecting phenomena that can potentially be extrapolated to human language in general. We collected recordings of 170 native adult speakers of the afore- mentioned 17 languages, each reading at their normal rate a standardized set of 15 semantically similar texts across the languages (for a total amount of approximately 240,000 syllables). Speakers became familiar with the texts, by reading them several times before being recorded, so that they understand the described situation and minimize reading errors (see Materials and Methods below for more details). For each recording, we extracted the duration [in seconds, excluding pauses longer than 150 ms, i.e., longer than typical phonemic silences (17)] and the total number of syllables (NS) of the text’s“canonical” pronunciation.
I'm brazillian and my mom complains i speak too fast all the time. I didnt actually expect portuguese to be in the list but looking back, im not very surprised
The sound of Portuguese is different depending on where you are. I'm from São Paulo, so the accent from Ceará, for example, sounds a little fast, and the accent from Portugal, especially from the countryside, sounds incomprehensible.
As a Brazilian Portuguese speaker, the hardest part about learning and pronouncing other languages like French and Russian is indeed that I speak so fucking fast I swallow so many sounds and letters. Although even here in Brazil I have people telling me to slow down so maybe I am the problem 😅
@@clarissemiller3274 I would recommend you to try learning with the accent from Bahia, while it's still fast we pronounce the vowels much more clearly than the Rio or São Paulo accent.
About the “don’t ask people to talk slower”, very true. I work as a Portuguese/English interpreter and one of the tenets of the profession is that asking people to speak more slowly is utterly useless. They may even comply with the request, but in a few sentences they will be back to their natural rhythm. In addition to that, people trying to speak more slowly will usually start breaking their speech in odd chunks (their idea of ‘slower’ is basically adding more and longer pauses), completely erasing any sense of naturalism in their speech, making it much more difficult to parse and translate.
I, too, am a PortugueseEnglish interpreter. English is my native language and when calls come in from northeast US, I literally sometimes have to ask the English speaker to slow down. Have you ever heard "Sa'rday" for example (New Jersey).
@grace-yz2sr So true lol. I was in Spain for 3 weeks and on one of my taxi rides I told the driver he spoke too fast for me to understand and asked if it was possible for him to speak slower... he just yelled at me and continued to talk his same speed lol.
There's no faster English than the woman's voice on pharmaceutical commercials when she rattles off the bad side effects of taking the advertised drug. 🤣 Americans will know.
I’m a Spanish student. Spanish is interesting because I find that it depends on which country you’re from. Colombians and Mexicans I find to speak a little slower and I can understand them a bit better. Spaniards and Dominicans speak SOOO fast. My barber is Dominican and I have no idea what he’s saying
@@ba8898lack of enunciation and sometimes changing or omiting sounds Caribbean Spanish in all of its varieties does this, from turning s into h r into l or French r getting rid of some d's
@@patax144 yep. Paraguayan Spanish, too, can be very difficult for similar reasons. And Andalucían Spanish - I've even heard native speakers from Latin America say they often couldn't understand very much when visiting Andalucía.
It can actually be difficult switching between Spanish speeds. If get used to a certain speed such as Spain or Venezuela and then speak to people from countries where they speak slower, it’s hard to adjust to this slower speed I find. It’s like someone speaking really slowly and get bored waiting for the next words.
I'm a native speaker of Portuguese and I'm at an intermediate level in English, Spanish and Italian. Honestly, I don't think spoken Italian is that fast. I can understand most speakers of Dante's language. I just don't understand them when they speak in dialect .The only exception so far has been a UA-cam channel called Casa Surace.
É provavelmente por causa da semelhança linguística. Embora não tenhamos estudado as línguas românicas, conseguimos entender muitas coisas pela proximidade.
@@tatatikah É pela familiaridade de sons. Os fonemas do italino são muito parecidos com o português, algumas palavras inclusive são quase iguais, mas soam um pouco diferente.
You wouldn't believe how hellish it is to be a native speaker of a language that doesn't support consonant clusters and then start encountering languages that do (in my case, it's Brazilian Portuguese, and i didn't even have to learn another language to discover those nightmares, just take a quick look at the European accents)
I've always loved Japanese because of this. It sounds like an advanced language (as in a futuristic world) because it's so efficient. And yet, the hard cap for languages is human brain processing, which makes all languages have the same data throughput
The speed of Spanish depends greatly on where it is spoken. Listening to Bolivians, Peruvians, or Colombians speak Spanish is NOTHING like listening to Dominicans, Cubans, or Puerto Ricans.
Yupp, that's right. In some Spanish dialects, like Andean ones, people tend to speak more paused and fully enunciate each word. Caribean dialects are the opposite. In Spain people tend to speak quite fast as well.
Yup, just like Portuguese, when it comes to dialects and accents, there are some who are fast AF, like the southern and northeast in Brazil. And don't even mention when we're fighting 😂😂😂
90% of people watching the video: See title, look for portuguese in the video, see the portuguese part until end, close video. Mentioning Brazil is the fastest way of getting 3x the amount of views
Nice video! Brazil is a massive continental country itself and has tons of regional portuguese accents that are different between themselves. I live in the region of Minas Gerais and for me, people from southern states seem to speak way slower than I'm used to, the speed at which people speak colloquially in daily life varies like A LOT depending on the accent. I guess this also applies to any massive country however, take the USA for example, I'm not american but I perceive that people from Texas speak way faster than those from California.
People from California speak slowly probably because they're already buzzed on drugs ....ahahahahah
День тому+1
When I lived in Brazil, I was in Sao Paulo state. I learned my accent there. When I went to other cities in other states, people would ask, "Voce esta um paulista?". This greatly amused me. No matter where you are from, there are lots of regional accents and words that can distinguish where you are from. Someone like Olly may be able, in certain languages, determine where you live, even if you grew up somewhere else. It can be freaky, lol
German doesn't really have a stronger tendency to build long words than other Germanic languages, such as English. In English you would say "almond biscuit", in German you would say "Mandelkeks". Both terms are compound nouns. The difference is just orthography and orthography is not really a property of a language. We might also write "Mandel Keks" and "almondbiscuit". (Just as you can write "homepage" or "home page".)
My mum called it Mandel bread rather than Mandelkek. I never gave it a thought until now, but I suppose it was due to its loaf shape rather than round. Mandel bread or kek is crumbly like a cookie for you rookies. Either way, it was wunderbar..
Wrong: German compound words are different from English. A danube steam engine society captains wife... doesnt make sense. In German it would make sense. Like "braves Schulstoffvermittlungskino" (only recently read in a comment on a dull German movie)
@@Jombozeus For English speakers it doesnt make sense, because they dont like compound words. "Making sense" and "still being able to understand" are two concepts. You can found German compound words on a spot and create new meaning... Trostlosigkeitsgarantie... how to translate this? The certainty of falling into tristesse via... 😮😅. Tellerschwund, Vertröstungsstrategie... Thomas Bernhard even jokingly created the word: Fäustlingswolle.
Also you’ve somewhat mischaracterized Turkish; if you’ll forgive me, it sounds a little bit like a “tourist view” of the language; reacting to the things that seem unusual to an English speaker without enough familiarity to look at it from inside. Turkish is agglutinative - they don’t string words together like German, they add suffixes that provide information like person, tense, mood and case. (When we say “hopelessness” in English, it’s not the same as a compound word like “lighthouse.”) In Turkish, those suffixes get strung together, and so they have undergone changes to make them flow more smoothly. That includes vowel harmony as well as consonant changes. Example: The suffix for “in/at” is da/de/ta/te. If you read these words you’ll see how it works: Ankara’da (in Ankara) Kocaeli’de (in Kocaeli) Yozgat’ta etc… İzmit’te It’s just a natural “smoothing” out of the suffixes, similar to the way contractions make words flow more easily. So you can have a word like “çalıştırılmamalıymış” (work + causative + passive + negative + should + 3rd person suffix for reported or surmised actions): “They say s/he shouldn’t be made to work.” And it just flows off the tongue easily. As for the “being kept hanging” by verb-final position, it’s only an issue if you’re trying to translate from English. It’s all information that combines to form the total thought being transmitted. Also, don’t mistake “official standard grammar” for the way people actually speak. Turkish is not so rigid in word order; there are lots of situations where you could put the verb at the beginning of a phrase, and in poetry it can be extremely flexible. You could argue that long sentences, which appear more in written Turkish, can get pretty complicated. But in reality even those long sentences are often a series of shorter verbal phrases. So it really isn’t this giant waiting game, unless you’re trying to translate. it is true that Turkish is very idiomatic, and a lot of those idioms don’t seem to make much sense if you translate them literally. But I would say a lot of that is linguistic culture as well. We don’t think twice when we say something like “what are you on about?” or “that’s just not on,” or “she’s really turned on.” Languages have idioms.
The speed of Japanese is very speaker-dependent, as well. Older ladies always tend to take their time, but your usual salaryman speaks ridiculously fast. The fastest ones are often restaurant owners, from my experience.
@@ЯрославКривич-ч4э Fubuki is a video game enthusist, hip-hop dancer, singer, meme lord, vtuber, and stage performer; if that be the case, she's got all of the advantage to speak like the example, helped by the nature of the Japanese language.
I got my undergrad degree in advanced linguistics, so my mom thought I'd find this video interesting (she was correct) and sent it to me. After just reading the title, and considering her penchant for sending me mini-lectures that are often dubiously credible, I was prepared to leave some kind of comment clarifying what I thought was sure to be an overly-simplistic rundown of languages that "sound faster". To my pleasant surprise, you present this topic very well and get the information across better than I could have. Kudos! You've got a new subscriber.
As a native Japanese speaker, I don’t really feel that my mother tongue is particularly fast or slow. If anything, English sounds way faster to us! Most of the time, Japanese natives can’t quite catch what’s being said and get confused, thinking “Oh🤯, that’s just too fast to understand...😦😧😟” One reason might be that Japan-born brains, tuned to mora-based language, tend to split unfamiliar syllables into consonants and vowels, interpreting each as separate units, or morae. For example, when the "In-gu-dish" speakers hear a genuine syllabic word such as “street,” it might sound like layered “sue-chu-ree.” Plus, Japanese people barely get any chance to train in English liaison. Unless the individuals study abroad or teach themselves outside of school, they rarely get exposed to how English words connect in real speech. So even a simple phrase like "hot or cold?" from an American can just blur together as one strange word: “her-ra-coe.” And listening to Adele’s interview was a total nightmare of British. WHAT THE 🤬!
@@alicesacco9329 I'm a Spaniard and for me Italian is mutually inteligible, but Italian has 3 times our vocabulary. We use a much reduced set of just 95,000 words, so Italian have many more Latin roots that are long forgotten in Spanish, or are just used in very complex academic words which common people never heard of.
But you say that English sounds faster to you, when you don't fully know the language or you're not used to the pace it's spoken naturally. I've been listening to English for 30 years, and I think only with UA-camrs from a lot of different countries I managed to get used to fluency in the last 3 or 4 years.
He explained on the video as well but Japanese is judged the fastest one not purely based on the speed the syllables are pronounced but also for the density of each and every syllable.. 1 Japanese syllable is equivalent to 11 English syllables!! I work in a English/Japanese speaking environment and every time translators are simultaneously translating from JPN -> ENG, they end up cutting off so much content cuz they cannot catch up with the speed x density equation
I was looking for this comment 😂 I’m learning hindi and I understood the comedian hindi clip but didnt get a lick of the first clip lmao. Glad to know it was a different language and my hindi was not THAT bad
Yeah. I know Hindi very well, that first one was not Hindi. Probably Gurjrathi or Marathi, or something along those lines. The second tho, that was FFUUUUNNNYYYYYYY!!!! “Ask your sister or your landlord for the money. You get beaten up either way. But, but, those were past times/old days.”
I read an article a few years ago about the study of language information density. This means how much information a language packs into syllables, etc. What they found is that the denser a language, the slower speech was because they didn't need to talk fast to get information out. The less dense (i.e. more sort of useless sounds), the faster a language is spoken. Ultimately what they found is that no matter the language or its speed, all languages generally get the same amount of information out in the same time frame.
It makes sense, especially considering that our brains need time to process information. The delivery of information is more about comprehension time than the speed of speech. For instance, in the German language, there are many terms and concepts related to philosophy and psychology. We can imagine a German speaker familiar with these concepts needing to speak more slowly so the listener has time to process the dense information and fully understand.
@@leandroaragao800 I don't think that's quite the same thing. It's more a matter of needing more sounds to get out the same amount of information. An example would be the word "enraged." That packs a lot of info in a single word. It doesn't just mean mad but "extremely, very mad." One word that normally takes three words to convey a meaning. Now imagine that in a language like Spanish, which is less dense information-wise than English . There are a lot of de, se, me, le, la. You can't just say "Juan's book." You'd say "El libro de Juan." It's simply more sounds and syllables. Therefore, spoken Spanish is faster than spoken English.
Language families often exhibit general trends in speech speed based on their common features. Romance languages (e.g., Spanish, Italian, French) are typically fast due to their simple syllable structures and complex conjugation systems, which facilitate rapid articulation. In contrast, Germanic languages (e.g., English, German, Dutch) tend to be slower, influenced by more complex syllable structures and stress-timed rhythms that create varied pacing. Sino-Tibetan languages (e.g., Mandarin, Cantonese) are usually slower because their tonal nature requires precise pronunciation to convey meaning. Slavic languages (e.g., Russian, Polish, Czech) often fall on the moderate to slower side due to complex consonant clusters and inflectional systems that can slow down speech.
Who put subtitles in "Saiki Kusuo no Psi-nan" deserves mad respect, because the protagonist made everyone in the anime to have a faster speech (and sometimes is so fast that there's no subtitles at all, at least in portuguese 💀)
A Thai friend recently told me he thinks Indonesians talk super fast, kind of like the Japanese or the Spanish. I had to break it down for him; this is because our words are generally longer, so yeah, we speed up to pack in enough info in less time. It’s different from tonal languages like Thai, Vietnamese, or Chinese, where the tones themselves already help convey meaning more efficiently. But here’s the funny part: it still doesn’t explain why we speak so much faster than Malaysians, even though our languages are closely related. Go figure! 😂
the reason why Indonesian is more faster than Malaysia is reason why Spanish is faster.But if you include Malaysian dialect some of them another beast.
It really calms me down that I am not the only one who learned french for years and still can't unterstand native conversations because of the speed...
Spanish here. The fact that our sound system is one of the most simplified of the world gives you an idea of how fast we speak. I'm talking about the European Spanish variety, not the versions in Latin America, where speed greatly varies. In Spanish you don't have B and V both are B. There are no short and long vowels, only short ones, why bother if you are never going to have the time to lengthen them...😂 Our languages is not rhythmic but syllabic, like Japanese, and both are very fast. You don't "waste" time modulating, sounds just burst out 😂 The speed in English is achieved through contraction and elision. We have that as well in the spoken language, para is pa or p when we speak fast. Also, hasta luego is" t'luego" the final "o" turning to almost a schwa. Speed varies among regions, with Andalusians and Castillians being the fastest speakers. One must consider that in some regions in Spain they have their own regional languages which are sometimes the first language of speakers, Spanish being a second language to them.
Rather than the "syllable per second" measurement, I'd rely on a "morpheme-per-second" measurement, so one can easily determine how much relevant information is being conveyed in one second. This might actually knock down Turkish and Japanese a bit, actually.
I think that's likely to measure something different from syllable rate... Something like the "propensity of the language to subdivide meaning into small grammatical units". For instance, English has the word "bureau" which is more or less 1 morpheme, and yet the same word in French is like 5 morphemes (many of which are silent): "bur", "eau", masculine, singular, and the fact that it's a noun...
@@debras3806 It's not exactly phonemes per second because that would overcount languages with fast syllable rate and complex syllables out of a small phoneme inventory (like Mohawk), and undercount languages with slow syllable rate and simple syllables with large phoneme inventories (like Ngiti).
I find the languages I understand to be slower than they're supposed to be in this list, which indicates that all of this is subjective and eventually anyone would be able to understand and speak a language with enough practice and determination 😊 EDIT: Exactly the point you're making at 17:20!
Great video! As a native English speaker I spent years learning Japanese.... but when I visited Japan what threw me was the 'compressed' nature of the language. For example "hito-ka' can mean 'who's you're friend?' (Hito-ka literally means person-questionmark). At the other end of the scale was the kind of phrase I found myself saying after I'd live in Wales for a while... "what is it we're going to do about this, now then?' (English = 'now what?')
18:52 I am a native Japanese speaker, but I cannot hear much of this part because it is too fast. The speaker does not seem to be able to keep up with the tongue either. Normal Japanese is not spoken this fast.
I can understand her from the context, but the entire clip sounded like a tongue twister. The only people in Japan who usually speak that fast are: (1) voice actors; (2) SERI or auction house; or (3) Rakugo.
She's a 'virtual youtuber'. A voice and model rig actor for a graphical puppet... usually for the purpose of live streaming. An entertainer, so yes, it's not regular Japanese anyway. It's casual entertainment Japanese. She pretends to be a saucy pirate captain and she and her audience are almost all otaku.
It's not normal Japanese talking speed, she is a vtuber named Fubuki, her "glasses are really versatile" rant is popular among the fanbase because of the fast talking speed(and also the subject matter). It's for comedic effect, she talks relatively slower in her regular streams. Her friend in red pirate clothes is Marine and she can also speak really fast, but her talking speed isn't the norm.
although its not exactly how japanese people talk, there are so many youtubers who make video like this and the fact that a lot of japanese people can watch and comprehend without pausing already shows how efficient the language is
@g1r4f45 the excerpt with the ladies dancing, with glitter outfits and feathers? I'm from Salvador da Bahia and I can assure you this is not here, not even Rio (where those extravagant outfits with feathers are really a thing for Carnaval, but even those from the video look different). The previous excerpt, yes, this one is here in Salvador. That's not the one I was referring to, though.
A great way to get your videos highly viewed is by talking about Brazil, brazilians or putting a photo of something to do with Brazil in your post hahaha you can see how many brazilians commented here. Very smart, sir! Great video too!
I have no problem understanding rapid-fire Latin American Spanish, but I sometimes have some difficulties with Iberian Spanish, which doesn't seem to flow as well. Perhaps that's because I learned Spanish first in Mexico, then perfected it in Central America, Peru, and Argentina.
Fastest speaker in the world was/is Luis Moya when he was copilot of Carlos Sainz in WRC. Try to find any footage from inside the car in any stage and just listen. The amount of syllables per second he is able to articulate is just amazing.
portuguese speakers from portugal speak much faster. if anything, i think brazilians are quite slow at speaking because we stretch our vowels, while in portugal they "eat" their vowels leaving only consonants lol
Well... a portuguese person may talk a little faster, because some non-stressed vowels in PT-Portuguese are more 'elastic' (brazilian accents lack those vowels), so they can be shortened or stretched very easily. On the other hand, some brazilian accents 'eat' some vowels the PT accents don´t.
Hi there, I’m brazilian and we have a really hard time understanding our portuguese fellows! It took me 3 to 4 times to get what the guy at 11,26min was saying (still not sure I really got it…)
Dat kunnen ze waarschijnlijk wel, ten eerste zijn ze eraan gewend, ten tweede is het waarschijnlijk niet zo snel als je misschien denkt Nederlands voelt wel een beetje snel, je hebt wel gelijk
Like many others said already; Spanish varies heavily depending on region, the fastest dialect by far is Metropolitan Chilean, not only because many consonants and ending letters just get flat out deleted, but also because its a language heavily reliant on local slang which either further abbreviates words, or replaces them with ones that have little to no consonants( Ex: Entiendes=Cachai, Estomago=Guata, Orinar=Mear) and another thing that is commonly done among the "lower class", is to sometimes combine the pronunciation of of two vowels that are together into one sound, which makes it even more confusing. All of this while already speaking extremely fast in general.
@@tookitogoit can be sometimes. Yes, in general we speak very fast but the country people from here tend to speak even faster to the point of being almost incomprehensible to the rest of the country lol
If you asked me the relative syllable rate of different languages I would have said: - Slowest syllable rate: Vietnamese, Cantonese, Thai, Hmong - Slow syllable rate: English, Mandarin - Slowish syllable rate: French, German and other Germanic languages - Medium syllable rate: Turkish, Finnish, Korean, Mongol, Slavic languages - Fastish syllable rate: Italian, Portuguese, Greek - Fast syllable rate: Spanish - Fastest syllable rate: Japanese, many Polynesian languages Generally, for East Asian languages, the raw number of distinct syllables is a good indicator of the syllable rate due to the isolating grammar and tendency to have a similar amount of complexity in each syllable. (This doesn't work in European languages due to the mix of simple and complex syllables) For Romance languages, comparing the speed isn't too difficult due to the similar grammar and vocabulary. Spanish words are very often the same as French but with an extra -a or -o and it adds up pretty fast... Also note that the syllable rate of French varies: it is fastest in Southern France, and slowest (bordering on the rate of English) in Canada and Northern France, with more elisions and contractions in the slower varieties and also fewer vowel mergers (Paris French has 13 vowels, Canadian French has 16 if you don't count English loans, some varieties are bordering on 10 vowels).
Mandarin is NOT the most spoken language in the world. It is the most spoken NATIVE language in the world. English is the most spoken language in the world when you account for it as a second, third, 4th language etc. Only about 380 million native English speakers, where it’s more than a billion second language English speakers. Mandarin is nearly a billion native speakers and just under 200 milllion second language speakers.
@@iuqz Yeah, who cares when a channel about educations gets stuff wrong? Just say whatever you like and whatever man? Cuz who cares? Go play with your crayons.
Well, I'm glad English is not on this list otherwise I wouldn't be able to understand you. This is by far my favorite video of yours. That's impressive that you were able to gather this information. Thank you Olly for sharing! 🤙
I never knew that our language is the fastest spoken language. I don't quite feel like that because I am a slower speaker in Japan, but it makes sense.
I am practicing 4 - 6 languages at the same time. For me, in all of them, if people would slow down to ~3/4 speed I am sure that I would understand them so much better. As such, when I speak to an English language learner I practice speaking @ 3/4 speed. I have been told that I am very easy to understand. Perhaps it’s just because my Vancouver Canada accent 😂
Excellent video! I speak Portuguese and Spanish natively, also French and last one is English, which is by far the hardest one for me. Because my brain is shaped with the Latin languages.
For me as a Czech speaker, English sounds very slow and I tend to speak faster in English as I am used to from my native language, but then I can't pronounce English properly in faster speed, so I have to constantly think about to speak slower in English. 🙂
The way I was expecting Korean to at least get an honorable mention... for some of the same reasons as Japanese. Their vowels are very similar and can easily shift meaning.... they covey a lot of meaning in a few words... and they also have a lot of "fun" particles and sentence markers and honorifics that give their words extra syllables.
I love that as a Brazilian Portuguese speaker I understood Italian better than European Portuguese lol. I really need to learn European Portuguese ASAP lol
I know it's never really mentioned in any major list you probably used for this vid, but I would say one of the very fast languages is also Czech, as very often when I speak Czech in front of other non-Czech speakers, mainly english speakers, they almost always ask me if I'm rapping, because of how fast I speak xD
Czech has stress on the first syllable. So you have specific rhythm when you speak, because of this your language really sound like rapping. Regards from Poland.
Perdona? Estrada es una palabra real que es básicamente como decir camino, carretera, via, etc… Mínimo antes de hablar coge un diccionario. Como mínimo, repito.
because of the structure of wording- phrasing of those languages, speakers tend to speak faster in order to get the information through. you could say romance languages are not so efficient, as in needing too many words for a single sentence, and because the syllables have simple sounds, its easier to say it faster.
Im a native English speaker (Seattle-ish) and I get called weird becaude I speak very quickly. I dont realize it. I think quickly too so people have to work to keep up (making me tje weird one i guess). Ive just realized that part of my comfort with my beau is that he's the same way.
@@SuhbanIo it happens when japanese is spoken really fast in a heated conversation. they mean the same. they also dropped a first syllable which is quite common
I’m Australian and my wife is from a non English speaking country. She pointed out that us Aussies tend to swallow our words, making complete sentences one word. When we met she couldn’t understand what I was saying so I had to learn to slow down and enunciate better. Now we are married she is fluent in “strayn” and I can speak in my natural voice.
Chileans and Dominicans might be able to rap Crucified songs, casually going “brbebebrbrbrbrbrbrbrbehrbfbfbrbfbrrbrbrbrbrbrbrbrbrbrbrbrvrvrvrvrbrhrhsyegrgshavefahavrbrbrbrbrrrr”
In Spain we hardly say ESTRADA. We say CALLE. I was about to tell that ESTRADA is an Italian word, but they say STRADA. But your point is correct. Check this out : VELOCIDAD / SPEED.
As a brazillian that also speaks english, I prefer thinking in english because I find it more efficient than portuguese. Like how you can just take nouns and turn them into verbs like "Let me *google* something" in portuguese you'd have to say "Deixa eu pesquisar uma coisa no google." (Let me search something on google). In portuguese you can't just go "Deixa eu *googlear* uma coisa."
I was watching your video at 1.5 speed and I can understand japanese. Actually I always watch anime at 2x speed, because I have really short breaks during the day... It's not so difficult to understand languages by listening. You just can't speak like them.
I didn't expect to see Portuguese in a high ranking, because we make a point of clearly pronouncing phonemes, I think it's a very clear language. At least PT-BR. I can't understand PT-PT.
When you don't know or at least accustomed to the language it seems faster than usual. I'm a Turk who speaks Japanese and while during my first days learning Japanese, it sounded crazy fast to me, but not anymore. On the contrary, as a speaker of three languages stated here (Turkish, English and Japanese) I find Greek really fast...specially its news (Greek TV can be watched from some parts of the country).
@@mucanan It turns out that you're right. I've lived in Spain for 35 years and have never heard it used, as far as I can remember. ChatGPT says the following: Yes, estrada is indeed a Spanish word, though it is not commonly used in everyday speech. It generally refers to a raised platform or stage, similar to the word estrado (which is more common). Both terms describe an elevated area used for public speaking, performances, or ceremonies. However, estrado is preferred in modern Spanish, while estrada may appear more often in historical or formal contexts, or in certain regional dialects. In summary: Estrado: Commonly used to refer to a stage or raised platform. Estrada: Less common, but still recognised, with the same meaning..
I've always noticed that about Turkish. Each sentence is a rapid-fire burst. It totally makes sense to me now that I know they put the verbs at the end!
I have been trying to learn russian for awhile and i would say russian is spoken pretty fast by natives, years back in highschool i was trying to learn japanese and i noticed a much easier time understanding native japanese speakers saying words i knew compared to russian
This is very interesting, specially as someone that speaks way too fast in my native language hahaha. I'm Brazilian, so I'm a native speaker of portuguese. I also know how to speak English (obviously) and Italian. The examples that were showed were actually easy to understand, and even easier with subtitles. That should be a sign for everyone to not be discouraged when facing these languages, because we eventually get used to speed. Now, this video is actually even more interesting to me, because I'm learning french currently and I started learning japanese some years ago but stopped because of time. Currently, speed in french is only a problem with words I don't yet know and when someone doesn't have a very clear pronunciation. On the other side of the coin, japanese was hell for me not because of speed but because of the fonetic nature of it. You see, the language is composed of syllables, not letters. So "Japan" in hiragana is にほん and in kanji it's 日本 , pronounced "nihon". You can see how its hard to follow spoken japanese even with subtitles, because you have to match the sound to the written syllable after it's completely said. And with kanji, it's matching a whole syllable or word with one symbol that changes meaning and pronunciation depending on context. Japanese is fast but for me the worse part is reading it at that same pace.
I've been learning Japanese for a while and I wondered if Japanese was going to be up there. But what's interesting is that you are very right about the effect of it. Now that you mention it, I can see that it's fast, but it's not something that really registers with your brain. It really is about the meaning. I will say that all of the syllables make it very difficult to find your place again once you start to get lost in a sentence.
Truth is that he needs content. And, as Englishman does, they can make anything look like it is real. There's no such thing as the fastest language, you can speak any language at any speed.
@@LAJAPOf course you can speak languages faster or slower but on average some are statistically proven to be faster than others. It’s noticeable on an anecdotal level too. It’s not a conspiracy theory.
@@InvinciblePythonEddy Read your contradiction. How do you statistically prove a language is faster than the next one, if anyone of its natives can speak it faster or slower at any time, in many different contexts? Who proved it statistically? Point us to that study. Is it statistically proved or anecdotal? Which is it? No wonder you had to bring up "conspiracy theory". I guess I was lucky, you could have thought I was being anti-semitic. I bet you've got all sorts of keywords that you've been taught to throw at others when someone calls your bullshit out.
@@LAJAP Don’t you know what on average means? Let me lay it out for you. A group of people within a certain language can and will speak at a certain speed naturally, but can periodically speak faster or slower depending on factors such as environment, emotion or stylistic choice. This will happen across languages however, some languages note a considerably faster speed even at normal rates of speech than others. Of course a Japanese person can speak at a snails pace or a Chinese person like a bullet train, that doesn’t mean all languages are consistently spoken at whatever whimsical speed one individual decides to spit their words out. There is literally a study on it, if you want to know the methodology just google which languages are fastest. There is also a plethora of videos which cover language speed and document peoples anecdotal experiences. Why are you even responding, you have no argument.
I'm brazilian and i actually used to speak too fast when i was young. I'm from the north east part and we tend to speak like that naturally (i think a similar would be Texas in EUA) But i was so over it man, i had to change my accent and i did🤖
at 0:44 you say mandarin Chinese is the most spoken language in the world. Although its the most spoken native language, english is actually is the most spoken. but thats a common mistake. anyways nice video
I actually thought the Italian examples you used were quite slow, maybe because they were explaining a concept or teaching, the average person talking casually to a friend can be faster than that. Maybe this explains why most English speaking sounds slow to me so I watch most videos at 2x speed.
I struggle with Portuguese because of the speed. People don't think I am fluent in Portuguese because of the speed, but I am. I just need more practice.
Learn these FAST languages FAST with my FREE StoryLearning Kit 👉🏼 bit.ly/free_SL_Kit_Fast
Malayalam is faster than all of these
I have alleged and will assert always, English the fastest language in the world.
Sorry, but this is nonsense. There's actual research on how fast-spoken languages are. In reality, the top 10 are
1. Japanese
2. Spanish
3. Basque
4. Finnish
5. Italian
6. Serbian
7. Korean
8. Catalan
9. Turkish
10. French
The Economist had a recent article on this. The research is by Coupé et al. (2019), published in Science Advances.
@@jonasholmqvist5231 what is the sample size of these studies? Are the Dravidian languages even included? In fact, I would argue the fastest language is Malayalam
@@SuhbanIo The researchers only studied 17 languages, so The Economist was wrong to claim they are the fastest - although it still disproves this video.
Here is the relevant paragraphs on methodology from the research article:
We studied a sample of 17languages from 9 language families spread across Europe and Asia, showing a remarkable diversity in terms of linguistic and typological features at all levels, from phonetics
and phonology to morphology and syntax and to semantics and prag-
matics (see table S1). Focusing on their phonetics and phonology, these languages vary in their number of phonemes (from 25 in Japanese and Spanish to more than 40 in English and Thai), the number of distinct
syllables (from a few hundred in Japanese to almost 7000 in English), tonal complexity (from none to six contrastive tones), and various otherphonological phenomena (e.g., vowel harmony is present in Finnish, Hungarian, Korean, and Turkish). Thanks to its size and diversity, this sample is adequate to reveal robust trends reflecting phenomena that can potentially be extrapolated to human language in general.
We collected recordings of 170 native adult speakers of the afore-
mentioned 17 languages, each reading at their normal rate a standardized set of 15 semantically similar texts across the languages (for a total amount of approximately 240,000 syllables). Speakers became familiar with the texts, by reading them several times before being recorded, so that they understand the described situation and minimize reading errors (see Materials and Methods below for more details). For each recording, we extracted the duration [in seconds, excluding pauses longer than 150 ms, i.e., longer than typical phonemic silences (17)] and the total number of syllables (NS) of the text’s“canonical” pronunciation.
Brazil mentioned...
🇧🇷🇧🇷
It was a deliberate move)))
QUEM NOS INVOCOU?? 🇧🇷
VAI BRASIUUUUUU
AEEEEE PORRAAAAAAAA
I'm brazillian and my mom complains i speak too fast all the time. I didnt actually expect portuguese to be in the list but looking back, im not very surprised
same!
I was going to say that Portuguese is not fast at all, but it's because I speak Spanish as mother tongue 😅
The sound of Portuguese is different depending on where you are. I'm from São Paulo, so the accent from Ceará, for example, sounds a little fast, and the accent from Portugal, especially from the countryside, sounds incomprehensible.
Baiano vendo isso 😢
Po, eu sou do Paraná e aqui a gente não fala tão rápido não (ou é só eu, sei lá)
o whindersson na capa invocando os brasileiros kkkkkkkk
Se ele acha que os brasileiros falam rápido, devia ver os portugueses 😂
Haha😂
@@Estudo-q6bportuguês de portugal parece ser otimizado pra fala rápida, pq vc não precisa abrir muito a boca pra falar com sotaque português
Pse mn sksksks, eles sabem q brasileiro viraliza vídeo
@@user-fi5mn8vj1j eu sou português amigo 🤣🤣
I saw Whindersson, I clicked. Well done.
Fiz também. 😅
EXATO KKKKKKKKKK
Sim João kkk
Eu tbm 😂ksksksk
Esse daí virou piada
As a Brazilian Portuguese speaker, the hardest part about learning and pronouncing other languages like French and Russian is indeed that I speak so fucking fast I swallow so many sounds and letters. Although even here in Brazil I have people telling me to slow down so maybe I am the problem 😅
I’m learning Portuguese and i feel like everyone swallows sounds. i sounds like everyone is speaking with mini marshmallows in their mouth!
@@clarissemiller3274 wait until you hear the north-east accent.
@@clarissemiller3274In the state of Minas Gerais they commonly swallow the words' ending.
@@clarissemiller3274 I would recommend you to try learning with the accent from Bahia, while it's still fast we pronounce the vowels much more clearly than the Rio or São Paulo accent.
@@everythingisblueevenyourso1432sotaque paulista é mais claro que o sotaque baiano
About the “don’t ask people to talk slower”, very true. I work as a Portuguese/English interpreter and one of the tenets of the profession is that asking people to speak more slowly is utterly useless. They may even comply with the request, but in a few sentences they will be back to their natural rhythm. In addition to that, people trying to speak more slowly will usually start breaking their speech in odd chunks (their idea of ‘slower’ is basically adding more and longer pauses), completely erasing any sense of naturalism in their speech, making it much more difficult to parse and translate.
I, too, am a PortugueseEnglish interpreter. English is my native language and when calls come in from northeast US, I literally sometimes have to ask the English speaker to slow down. Have you ever heard "Sa'rday" for example (New Jersey).
@@NomdePluminha This is very interesting. Keep us updated.
If you ask native people to speak slower, many of them tend to speak louder ^^
@grace-yz2sr So true lol. I was in Spain for 3 weeks and on one of my taxi rides I told the driver he spoke too fast for me to understand and asked if it was possible for him to speak slower... he just yelled at me and continued to talk his same speed lol.
@@Gleveniel This driver knows what real service is, lol.
There's no faster English than the woman's voice on pharmaceutical commercials when she rattles off the bad side effects of taking the advertised drug. 🤣 Americans will know.
She to me, sounds like she is sped up.
Ben Shapiro 😂
It's like that all over the world...
Yeah. It's the same in Brazil@@AlienInSider
It's the same with Spanish except the voice is male most of the time
I’m a Spanish student. Spanish is interesting because I find that it depends on which country you’re from. Colombians and Mexicans I find to speak a little slower and I can understand them a bit better. Spaniards and Dominicans speak SOOO fast. My barber is Dominican and I have no idea what he’s saying
It's not just the speed but the lack of enunciation, which seems to be more common in some regions than in others.
@@ba8898lack of enunciation and sometimes changing or omiting sounds Caribbean Spanish in all of its varieties does this, from turning s into h r into l or French r getting rid of some d's
@@patax144 yep. Paraguayan Spanish, too, can be very difficult for similar reasons. And Andalucían Spanish - I've even heard native speakers from Latin America say they often couldn't understand very much when visiting Andalucía.
It can actually be difficult switching between Spanish speeds. If get used to a certain speed such as Spain or Venezuela and then speak to people from countries where they speak slower, it’s hard to adjust to this slower speed I find. It’s like someone speaking really slowly and get bored waiting for the next words.
Dominican here, you speak the truth about Dominicans speaking at the speed of light 🤣🤣🤣
I'm a native speaker of Portuguese and I'm at an intermediate level in English, Spanish and Italian. Honestly, I don't think spoken Italian is that fast. I can understand most speakers of Dante's language. I just don't understand them when they speak in dialect .The only exception so far has been a UA-cam channel called Casa Surace.
Is it a deliberate move on their part to speak to you in dialect?
É provavelmente por causa da semelhança linguística. Embora não tenhamos estudado as línguas românicas, conseguimos entender muitas coisas pela proximidade.
No ma infatti, ero molto sorpreso quando ho visto che la lingua italiana era inclusa
@@wallysilva6937português é uma língua romântica,tem origem do Latim..assim como o Italiano
@@NARAA-t6b sim, eu quis dizer as outras línguas românicas, além da nossa
That’s so funny. Portuguese (my native language) and Italian (which I don’t speak) seemed to be the slowest ones for me.
Brother, if you thought that Italian is slower, you don't have any experience with the language.
@ that was my impression watching the video. It was quite easy to understand.
@@tatatikah É pela familiaridade de sons. Os fonemas do italino são muito parecidos com o português, algumas palavras inclusive são quase iguais, mas soam um pouco diferente.
@ pode ser isso sim 😀
SIIIIM! 😂
Next, please do the slowest spoken languages in the world.
would be Korean and Malaysian lmao
malayasian feels too Slow?
YES
@@sahkogileKorean tends to be fast. There are only certain regions that speak slowly
I love Japanese and German when spoken slowly. So soothing
I like japanese as it is so clear . Consonant followed by vowel. Almost like a artificial made language. No annoying consonant clusters
And Japanese still hasn't deteriorate
You wouldn't believe how hellish it is to be a native speaker of a language that doesn't support consonant clusters and then start encountering languages that do (in my case, it's Brazilian Portuguese, and i didn't even have to learn another language to discover those nightmares, just take a quick look at the European accents)
I've always loved Japanese because of this. It sounds like an advanced language (as in a futuristic world) because it's so efficient. And yet, the hard cap for languages is human brain processing, which makes all languages have the same data throughput
@@bennythetiger6052
Alavise love japanese bicaze thise fiture. If English was japanese lol
@@fulana_de_tal I can sympathise with native Japanese speakers trying to learn Croatian, Polish, Welsh, etc.
The speed of Spanish depends greatly on where it is spoken. Listening to Bolivians, Peruvians, or Colombians speak Spanish is NOTHING like listening to Dominicans, Cubans, or Puerto Ricans.
Yupp, that's right. In some Spanish dialects, like Andean ones, people tend to speak more paused and fully enunciate each word. Caribean dialects are the opposite. In Spain people tend to speak quite fast as well.
I think the Spanish language has deteriorate since it was widespread in Latin America. Classical Spanish is better.
@@nadiapitarch5870 I think the Spanish language has deteriorate since it was widespread in Latin America. Classic Spanish is better.
Caribbeans don't speak specially fast. Black people always trims and chop the words as in every language.
Yup, just like Portuguese, when it comes to dialects and accents, there are some who are fast AF, like the southern and northeast in Brazil. And don't even mention when we're fighting 😂😂😂
90% of people watching the video: See title, look for portuguese in the video, see the portuguese part until end, close video. Mentioning Brazil is the fastest way of getting 3x the amount of views
Hahahahahahahahaah
which is pathetic, by the way.
Verdade 😂😂😂
Thanks! 😂
Nice video! Brazil is a massive continental country itself and has tons of regional portuguese accents that are different between themselves. I live in the region of Minas Gerais and for me, people from southern states seem to speak way slower than I'm used to, the speed at which people speak colloquially in daily life varies like A LOT depending on the accent. I guess this also applies to any massive country however, take the USA for example, I'm not american but I perceive that people from Texas speak way faster than those from California.
Exatamente.
Catarinense é uma lesma pra falar, e olha q eu sou do RS e aqui a gente já fala cadenciado, mas em SC a coisa é ainda mais embaixo kkkk
People from California speak slowly probably because they're already buzzed on drugs ....ahahahahah
When I lived in Brazil, I was in Sao Paulo state. I learned my accent there. When I went to other cities in other states, people would ask, "Voce esta um paulista?". This greatly amused me.
No matter where you are from, there are lots of regional accents and words that can distinguish where you are from. Someone like Olly may be able, in certain languages, determine where you live, even if you grew up somewhere else. It can be freaky, lol
German doesn't really have a stronger tendency to build long words than other Germanic languages, such as English. In English you would say "almond biscuit", in German you would say "Mandelkeks". Both terms are compound nouns. The difference is just orthography and orthography is not really a property of a language. We might also write "Mandel Keks" and "almondbiscuit". (Just as you can write "homepage" or "home page".)
My mum called it Mandel bread rather than Mandelkek. I never gave it a thought until now, but I suppose it was due to its loaf shape rather than round. Mandel bread or kek is crumbly like a cookie for you rookies. Either way, it was wunderbar..
I live in Germany and tell Germans this and they get very sad because it’s like I took away one of their toys.
Wrong: German compound words are different from English. A danube steam engine society captains wife... doesnt make sense. In German it would make sense. Like "braves Schulstoffvermittlungskino" (only recently read in a comment on a dull German movie)
@@kapuzinergruft it absolutely makes sense. If I wrote “Danubesteamengine’scaptain’swife” you tell me honest to god you can’t decipher what it is
@@Jombozeus For English speakers it doesnt make sense, because they dont like compound words. "Making sense" and "still being able to understand" are two concepts. You can found German compound words on a spot and create new meaning... Trostlosigkeitsgarantie... how to translate this? The certainty of falling into tristesse via... 😮😅. Tellerschwund, Vertröstungsstrategie... Thomas Bernhard even jokingly created the word: Fäustlingswolle.
Also you’ve somewhat mischaracterized Turkish; if you’ll forgive me, it sounds a little bit like a “tourist view” of the language; reacting to the things that seem unusual to an English speaker without enough familiarity to look at it from inside.
Turkish is agglutinative - they don’t string words together like German, they add suffixes that provide information like person, tense, mood and case.
(When we say “hopelessness” in English, it’s not the same as a compound word like “lighthouse.”)
In Turkish, those suffixes get strung together, and so they have undergone changes to make them flow more smoothly. That includes vowel harmony as well as consonant changes. Example: The suffix for “in/at” is da/de/ta/te. If you read these words you’ll see how it works:
Ankara’da (in Ankara)
Kocaeli’de (in Kocaeli)
Yozgat’ta etc…
İzmit’te
It’s just a natural “smoothing” out of the suffixes, similar to the way contractions make words flow more easily. So you can have a word like “çalıştırılmamalıymış” (work + causative + passive + negative + should + 3rd person suffix for reported or surmised actions): “They say s/he shouldn’t be made to work.” And it just flows off the tongue easily.
As for the “being kept hanging” by verb-final position, it’s only an issue if you’re trying to translate from English. It’s all information that combines to form the total thought being transmitted. Also, don’t mistake “official standard grammar” for the way people actually speak. Turkish is not so rigid in word order; there are lots of situations where you could put the verb at the beginning of a phrase, and in poetry it can be extremely flexible.
You could argue that long sentences, which appear more in written Turkish, can get pretty complicated. But in reality even those long sentences are often a series of shorter verbal phrases. So it really isn’t this giant waiting game, unless you’re trying to translate.
it is true that Turkish is very idiomatic, and a lot of those idioms don’t seem to make much sense if you translate them literally. But I would say a lot of that is linguistic culture as well. We don’t think twice when we say something like “what are you on about?” or “that’s just not on,” or “she’s really turned on.” Languages have idioms.
Dont be salty. no one cares about your culture of armenians and greeks k1llers anyway.
I feel like your comment will help me learn turkish
@ İnşallah. :-)
@@sazji no one cares about your culture of genociders anyway.
Yezzzz, you took it personally!
this video was genuinely interesting, thanks for sharing it with us
Glad you enjoyed it!
Unfortunately the information in it was wrong, though 😒
@@jonasholmqvist5231 Can you give an instance?
The speed of Japanese is very speaker-dependent, as well. Older ladies always tend to take their time, but your usual salaryman speaks ridiculously fast. The fastest ones are often restaurant owners, from my experience.
This is the result of immense intake of manga and anime. I am ready to allege this because my friend is instance it.
Every language is speaker dependent to a certain degree
salaryman?
@@ЯрославКривич-ч4э Fubuki is a video game enthusist, hip-hop dancer, singer, meme lord, vtuber, and stage performer; if that be the case, she's got all of the advantage to speak like the example, helped by the nature of the Japanese language.
I'm Brazilian and when I hear Portuguese people speaking I usually don't understand at all what they're saying
Now imagine working in a call center in Sao Paulo and receive call from them... Thank God I have a new job now.
I got my undergrad degree in advanced linguistics, so my mom thought I'd find this video interesting (she was correct) and sent it to me. After just reading the title, and considering her penchant for sending me mini-lectures that are often dubiously credible, I was prepared to leave some kind of comment clarifying what I thought was sure to be an overly-simplistic rundown of languages that "sound faster". To my pleasant surprise, you present this topic very well and get the information across better than I could have. Kudos! You've got a new subscriber.
Oh a degree. How fancy. Sounds useful
As a native Japanese speaker, I don’t really feel that my mother tongue is particularly fast or slow. If anything, English sounds way faster to us! Most of the time, Japanese natives can’t quite catch what’s being said and get confused, thinking “Oh🤯, that’s just too fast to understand...😦😧😟”
One reason might be that Japan-born brains, tuned to mora-based language, tend to split unfamiliar syllables into consonants and vowels, interpreting each as separate units, or morae. For example, when the "In-gu-dish" speakers hear a genuine syllabic word such as “street,” it might sound like layered “sue-chu-ree.”
Plus, Japanese people barely get any chance to train in English liaison. Unless the individuals study abroad or teach themselves outside of school, they rarely get exposed to how English words connect in real speech. So even a simple phrase like "hot or cold?" from an American can just blur together as one strange word: “her-ra-coe.” And listening to Adele’s interview was a total nightmare of British. WHAT THE 🤬!
I'm Italian and Japanese doesn't sounds that fast in my ears. To me, the only one that sounds fast is Spanish.
@@alicesacco9329 I'm a Spaniard and for me Italian is mutually inteligible, but Italian has 3 times our vocabulary. We use a much reduced set of just 95,000 words, so Italian have many more Latin roots that are long forgotten in Spanish, or are just used in very complex academic words which common people never heard of.
But you say that English sounds faster to you, when you don't fully know the language or you're not used to the pace it's spoken naturally.
I've been listening to English for 30 years, and I think only with UA-camrs from a lot of different countries I managed to get used to fluency in the last 3 or 4 years.
He explained on the video as well but Japanese is judged the fastest one not purely based on the speed the syllables are pronounced but also for the density of each and every syllable.. 1 Japanese syllable is equivalent to 11 English syllables!! I work in a English/Japanese speaking environment and every time translators are simultaneously translating from JPN -> ENG, they end up cutting off so much content cuz they cannot catch up with the speed x density equation
5:54 this clip is NOT hindi. It’s a South Indian language, maybe Tamil or Malayalam but I’m not familiar with them to know for sure.
It’s Marathi from Maharashtra.
I was looking for this comment 😂 I’m learning hindi and I understood the comedian hindi clip but didnt get a lick of the first clip lmao. Glad to know it was a different language and my hindi was not THAT bad
Yeah. I know Hindi very well, that first one was not Hindi. Probably Gurjrathi or Marathi, or something along those lines. The second tho, that was FFUUUUNNNYYYYYYY!!!! “Ask your sister or your landlord for the money. You get beaten up either way. But, but, those were past times/old days.”
The number of factual errors in this video is astonishing.
I can assure you that was not gujrati as well@@LlyrKimimela
I read an article a few years ago about the study of language information density. This means how much information a language packs into syllables, etc. What they found is that the denser a language, the slower speech was because they didn't need to talk fast to get information out. The less dense (i.e. more sort of useless sounds), the faster a language is spoken. Ultimately what they found is that no matter the language or its speed, all languages generally get the same amount of information out in the same time frame.
EXACTLY!
The truth has been spoken
It makes sense, especially considering that our brains need time to process information. The delivery of information is more about comprehension time than the speed of speech. For instance, in the German language, there are many terms and concepts related to philosophy and psychology. We can imagine a German speaker familiar with these concepts needing to speak more slowly so the listener has time to process the dense information and fully understand.
@@leandroaragao800 I don't think that's quite the same thing. It's more a matter of needing more sounds to get out the same amount of information. An example would be the word "enraged." That packs a lot of info in a single word. It doesn't just mean mad but "extremely, very mad." One word that normally takes three words to convey a meaning.
Now imagine that in a language like Spanish, which is less dense information-wise than English . There are a lot of de, se, me, le, la. You can't just say "Juan's book." You'd say "El libro de Juan." It's simply more sounds and syllables. Therefore, spoken Spanish is faster than spoken English.
This is fascinating. Do you know the source/reference?
Language families often exhibit general trends in speech speed based on their common features. Romance languages (e.g., Spanish, Italian, French) are typically fast due to their simple syllable structures and complex conjugation systems, which facilitate rapid articulation. In contrast, Germanic languages (e.g., English, German, Dutch) tend to be slower, influenced by more complex syllable structures and stress-timed rhythms that create varied pacing. Sino-Tibetan languages (e.g., Mandarin, Cantonese) are usually slower because their tonal nature requires precise pronunciation to convey meaning. Slavic languages (e.g., Russian, Polish, Czech) often fall on the moderate to slower side due to complex consonant clusters and inflectional systems that can slow down speech.
Have you ever seen a really fast English speaker? It surpasses any romance language in terms of speed, I guarantee you that
Who put subtitles in "Saiki Kusuo no Psi-nan" deserves mad respect, because the protagonist made everyone in the anime to have a faster speech (and sometimes is so fast that there's no subtitles at all, at least in portuguese 💀)
A Thai friend recently told me he thinks Indonesians talk super fast, kind of like the Japanese or the Spanish. I had to break it down for him; this is because our words are generally longer, so yeah, we speed up to pack in enough info in less time. It’s different from tonal languages like Thai, Vietnamese, or Chinese, where the tones themselves already help convey meaning more efficiently. But here’s the funny part: it still doesn’t explain why we speak so much faster than Malaysians, even though our languages are closely related. Go figure! 😂
the reason why Indonesian is more faster than Malaysia is reason why Spanish is faster.But if you include Malaysian dialect some of them another beast.
@@sahkogile This is an instance of how even close languages can be so different.
@@ЯрославКривич-ч4э yes
It really calms me down that I am not the only one who learned french for years and still can't unterstand native conversations because of the speed...
And then there’s Québec French that keeps the rhythm but tosses out half the sounds like Dominican or Cuban Spanish would
Where in the modern world can French be applied?
@@ЯрославКривич-ч4э what
@@Satan-lb8pu Why are you surprised?
@@ЯрославКривич-ч4эin France 😊
Spanish here.
The fact that our sound system is one of the most simplified of the world gives you an idea of how fast we speak. I'm talking about the European Spanish variety, not the versions in Latin America, where speed greatly varies.
In Spanish you don't have B and V both are B. There are no short and long vowels, only short ones, why bother if you are never going to have the time to lengthen them...😂
Our languages is not rhythmic but syllabic, like Japanese, and both are very fast. You don't "waste" time modulating, sounds just burst out 😂
The speed in English is achieved through contraction and elision. We have that as well in the spoken language, para is pa or p when we speak fast. Also, hasta luego is" t'luego" the final "o" turning to almost a schwa.
Speed varies among regions, with Andalusians and Castillians being the fastest speakers. One must consider that in some regions in Spain they have their own regional languages which are sometimes the first language of speakers, Spanish being a second language to them.
Rather than the "syllable per second" measurement, I'd rely on a "morpheme-per-second" measurement, so one can easily determine how much relevant information is being conveyed in one second. This might actually knock down Turkish and Japanese a bit, actually.
You can implement this in your own video. If you allege this, you should prove it.
I think that's likely to measure something different from syllable rate... Something like the "propensity of the language to subdivide meaning into small grammatical units". For instance, English has the word "bureau" which is more or less 1 morpheme, and yet the same word in French is like 5 morphemes (many of which are silent): "bur", "eau", masculine, singular, and the fact that it's a noun...
I expected the measurement would be phonemes per second.
There are probably numerous ways this could be accounted that would have varying advantages.
@@debras3806 It's not exactly phonemes per second because that would overcount languages with fast syllable rate and complex syllables out of a small phoneme inventory (like Mohawk), and undercount languages with slow syllable rate and simple syllables with large phoneme inventories (like Ngiti).
I find the languages I understand to be slower than they're supposed to be in this list, which indicates that all of this is subjective and eventually anyone would be able to understand and speak a language with enough practice and determination 😊
EDIT: Exactly the point you're making at 17:20!
I agree with story learning being effective. My Spanish teacher uses it and it works GREAT
I’m a young native mandarin, I just love hearing ancient languages being spoken. It’s just sounds beautiful
我是一个年轻的中国人。我超喜欢听古老的语言的声音。我就是觉得听起来特别流畅。
Eminem raps in English above 9.6 syllables per second.
Lol😁This is the best instance of the fastest spoken language today.
Over 11 in some songs.
i'm brazilian. English is much faster than any latin language.
But... he is rapping, not talking. This doesn't get in the data for the statistics.
Great video! As a native English speaker I spent years learning Japanese.... but when I visited Japan what threw me was the 'compressed' nature of the language. For example "hito-ka' can mean 'who's you're friend?' (Hito-ka literally means person-questionmark). At the other end of the scale was the kind of phrase I found myself saying after I'd live in Wales for a while... "what is it we're going to do about this, now then?' (English = 'now what?')
May I ask the scenario in which we would say something like 人か？
18:52 I am a native Japanese speaker, but I cannot hear much of this part because it is too fast. The speaker does not seem to be able to keep up with the tongue either. Normal Japanese is not spoken this fast.
オタク特有の早口ってやつか
certainly not "normal" but i can understand it
I can understand her from the context, but the entire clip sounded like a tongue twister. The only people in Japan who usually speak that fast are: (1) voice actors; (2) SERI or auction house; or (3) Rakugo.
She's a 'virtual youtuber'.
A voice and model rig actor for a graphical puppet... usually for the purpose of live streaming.
An entertainer, so yes, it's not regular Japanese anyway. It's casual entertainment Japanese.
She pretends to be a saucy pirate captain and she and her audience are almost all otaku.
It's not normal Japanese talking speed, she is a vtuber named Fubuki, her "glasses are really versatile" rant is popular among the fanbase because of the fast talking speed(and also the subject matter). It's for comedic effect, she talks relatively slower in her regular streams. Her friend in red pirate clothes is Marine and she can also speak really fast, but her talking speed isn't the norm.
although its not exactly how japanese people talk, there are so many youtubers who make video like this and the fact that a lot of japanese people can watch and comprehend without pausing already shows how efficient the language is
10:26, not Brazil! Maybe Trinidad and Tobago?
This is Bahia
@g1r4f45 the excerpt with the ladies dancing, with glitter outfits and feathers? I'm from Salvador da Bahia and I can assure you this is not here, not even Rio (where those extravagant outfits with feathers are really a thing for Carnaval, but even those from the video look different). The previous excerpt, yes, this one is here in Salvador. That's not the one I was referring to, though.
@@Arthur.F.L❤dois brasileiros falando em inglês kkkkkkkkk
@@Arthur.F.L e clarament3 brasil man
Não é Brasil, é Pelourinho! 😂 (which is in Salvador, Bahia)
A great way to get your videos highly viewed is by talking about Brazil, brazilians or putting a photo of something to do with Brazil in your post hahaha you can see how many brazilians commented here. Very smart, sir! Great video too!
The domination of this list by Romance languages makes me wonder what how fast the speaking rate of classical Latin was
10:05 it's this part the most Brazilians want to see
I have no problem understanding rapid-fire Latin American Spanish, but I sometimes have some difficulties with Iberian Spanish, which doesn't seem to flow as well. Perhaps that's because I learned Spanish first in Mexico, then perfected it in Central America, Peru, and Argentina.
1. Japanese
2. Spanish
3. French
4. Italian
5. Portuguese
6. Turkish
7. Hindi
8. English
9. Vietnamese
10. Mandarin
Fastest speaker in the world was/is Luis Moya when he was copilot of Carlos Sainz in WRC. Try to find any footage from inside the car in any stage and just listen. The amount of syllables per second he is able to articulate is just amazing.
portuguese speakers from portugal speak much faster. if anything, i think brazilians are quite slow at speaking because we stretch our vowels, while in portugal they "eat" their vowels leaving only consonants lol
f'ma um s'garro
Well... a portuguese person may talk a little faster, because some non-stressed vowels in PT-Portuguese are more 'elastic' (brazilian accents lack those vowels), so they can be shortened or stretched very easily. On the other hand, some brazilian accents 'eat' some vowels the PT accents don´t.
@@バロクエ No way, nothing 'eaten' here...
'fuma um cigarro' -> [fumɐ ũ sigaʁu]
@@Krka1716 Oh it's a reference to a meme lol
@@Krka1716portuguese are the ones eating vowels and leaving only consonants.
Hi there, I’m brazilian and we have a really hard time understanding our portuguese fellows! It took me 3 to 4 times to get what the guy at 11,26min was saying (still not sure I really got it…)
My honorable mention: Dutch
I have been living in NL for 5 years and I still cannot understand two Dutch people speaking to one another
I don't think they can either ;)
Dat kunnen ze waarschijnlijk wel, ten eerste zijn ze eraan gewend, ten tweede is het waarschijnlijk niet zo snel als je misschien denkt
Nederlands voelt wel een beetje snel, je hebt wel gelijk
Ik heb Nederlands als moedertaal
Like many others said already; Spanish varies heavily depending on region, the fastest dialect by far is Metropolitan Chilean, not only because many consonants and ending letters just get flat out deleted, but also because its a language heavily reliant on local slang which either further abbreviates words, or replaces them with ones that have little to no consonants( Ex: Entiendes=Cachai, Estomago=Guata, Orinar=Mear) and another thing that is commonly done among the "lower class", is to sometimes combine the pronunciation of of two vowels that are together into one sound, which makes it even more confusing.
All of this while already speaking extremely fast in general.
I would be very, very surprised if Chilean were anywhere near as fast as Andalusian Spanish.
@@tookitogoit can be sometimes. Yes, in general we speak very fast but the country people from here tend to speak even faster to the point of being almost incomprehensible to the rest of the country lol
If you asked me the relative syllable rate of different languages I would have said:
- Slowest syllable rate: Vietnamese, Cantonese, Thai, Hmong
- Slow syllable rate: English, Mandarin
- Slowish syllable rate: French, German and other Germanic languages
- Medium syllable rate: Turkish, Finnish, Korean, Mongol, Slavic languages
- Fastish syllable rate: Italian, Portuguese, Greek
- Fast syllable rate: Spanish
- Fastest syllable rate: Japanese, many Polynesian languages
Generally, for East Asian languages, the raw number of distinct syllables is a good indicator of the syllable rate due to the isolating grammar and tendency to have a similar amount of complexity in each syllable. (This doesn't work in European languages due to the mix of simple and complex syllables)
For Romance languages, comparing the speed isn't too difficult due to the similar grammar and vocabulary. Spanish words are very often the same as French but with an extra -a or -o and it adds up pretty fast... Also note that the syllable rate of French varies: it is fastest in Southern France, and slowest (bordering on the rate of English) in Canada and Northern France, with more elisions and contractions in the slower varieties and also fewer vowel mergers (Paris French has 13 vowels, Canadian French has 16 if you don't count English loans, some varieties are bordering on 10 vowels).
Olly. You talk pretty fast yourself. I watch various videos to study English, but your speaking speed is one of the best.
Yes, you should apply it
Mandarin is NOT the most spoken language in the world. It is the most spoken NATIVE language in the world. English is the most spoken language in the world when you account for it as a second, third, 4th language etc. Only about 380 million native English speakers, where it’s more than a billion second language English speakers. Mandarin is nearly a billion native speakers and just under 200 milllion second language speakers.
Right now they're more people speaking Chinese than other languages in the world, so we can say that Chinese is the most spoken language
Who cares bro
@@iuqz Yeah, who cares when a channel about educations gets stuff wrong? Just say whatever you like and whatever man? Cuz who cares? Go play with your crayons.
@bleepbloop6234 he really didn't get it wrong, just wasn't as specific. Chill bro.
@@iuqz No, the statement is objectively wrong. You're a total ignoramus for telling people who are correcting mistakes "who cares?" Utter lobotomite.
Que video incrível, amei❤
Well, I'm glad English is not on this list otherwise I wouldn't be able to understand you. This is by far my favorite video of yours. That's impressive that you were able to gather this information. Thank you Olly for sharing! 🤙
Glad you liked it!
I thought I speak Portuguese but these Portugal clips are wild lol
I never knew that our language is the fastest spoken language. I don't quite feel like that because I am a slower speaker in Japan, but it makes sense.
I am practicing 4 - 6 languages at the same time. For me, in all of them, if people would slow down to ~3/4 speed I am sure that I would understand them so much better. As such, when I speak to an English language learner I practice speaking @ 3/4 speed. I have been told that I am very easy to understand. Perhaps it’s just because my Vancouver Canada accent 😂
Excellent video! I speak Portuguese and Spanish natively, also French and last one is English, which is by far the hardest one for me. Because my brain is shaped with the Latin languages.
I’m surprised greek ain’t here sometimes when I talk to my parents I can’t tell what they are saying because they talk so fast
For me as a Czech speaker, English sounds very slow and I tend to speak faster in English as I am used to from my native language, but then I can't pronounce English properly in faster speed, so I have to constantly think about to speak slower in English. 🙂
The way I was expecting Korean to at least get an honorable mention... for some of the same reasons as Japanese. Their vowels are very similar and can easily shift meaning.... they covey a lot of meaning in a few words... and they also have a lot of "fun" particles and sentence markers and honorifics that give their words extra syllables.
I am Brazilian, born and raised. I should say that Portuguese spoken in Pernambuco is really fast.
De qual estado vc é?
I really appreciate u linking the videos u use under the description! thank uu
There is no way that English is anywhere near the top 10! Still a fascinating topic regardless.
I love that as a Brazilian Portuguese speaker I understood Italian better than European Portuguese lol. I really need to learn European Portuguese ASAP lol
I know it's never really mentioned in any major list you probably used for this vid, but I would say one of the very fast languages is also Czech, as very often when I speak Czech in front of other non-Czech speakers, mainly english speakers, they almost always ask me if I'm rapping, because of how fast I speak xD
Czech has stress on the first syllable. So you have specific rhythm when you speak, because of this your language really sound like rapping. Regards from Poland.
Olly, thank you for briefly including Catalan!! I'm currently learning it and when I speak with native speakers I often find it hard to keep up.
Estrada is not a Spanish word (17:40)
Perdona? Estrada es una palabra real que es básicamente como decir camino, carretera, via, etc…
Mínimo antes de hablar coge un diccionario. Como mínimo, repito.
So cool and well-explained! I love when people actually know what they're talking about. Keep up with the great work!
So the top 5 comprises the 4 major romance languages plus Japanese. It's almost like there's some kind of pattern there...
because of the structure of wording- phrasing of those languages, speakers tend to speak faster in order to get the information through. you could say romance languages are not so efficient, as in needing too many words for a single sentence, and because the syllables have simple sounds, its easier to say it faster.
Im a native English speaker (Seattle-ish) and I get called weird becaude I speak very quickly. I dont realize it. I think quickly too so people have to work to keep up (making me tje weird one i guess). Ive just realized that part of my comfort with my beau is that he's the same way.
My words go so fast that my sentence just slurs
ざけんじゃねぇよコラ！
↓
ざけんじゃねぇよオラ！
友達、俺もそこに迷ったと思う！
I don't see the differece except the second last character
@@SuhbanIo it happens when japanese is spoken really fast in a heated conversation. they mean the same. they also dropped a first syllable which is quite common
I’m Australian and my wife is from a non English speaking country. She pointed out that us Aussies tend to swallow our words, making complete sentences one word. When we met she couldn’t understand what I was saying so I had to learn to slow down and enunciate better. Now we are married she is fluent in “strayn” and I can speak in my natural voice.
Chileans and Dominicans might be able to rap Crucified songs, casually going “brbebebrbrbrbrbrbrbrbehrbfbfbrbfbrrbrbrbrbrbrbrbrbrbrbrbrvrvrvrvrbrhrhsyegrgshavefahavrbrbrbrbrrrr”
In Spain we hardly say ESTRADA. We say CALLE. I was about to tell that ESTRADA is an Italian word, but they say STRADA. But your point is correct. Check this out : VELOCIDAD / SPEED.
O Whindersson no vídeo. Não tankei
Você é seguidor do canal? Eu tomei um susto como seguidora do canal kkkkk
@MayseSantana Eu sou kkkkkk adoro o Olly
@MayseSantana ou você tá falando do Whindersson?
@@tabularasa_br é do Olly mesmo kkkkk Achei bem aleatório, mas enfim
As a brazillian that also speaks english, I prefer thinking in english because I find it more efficient than portuguese.
Like how you can just take nouns and turn them into verbs like "Let me *google* something" in portuguese you'd have to say "Deixa eu pesquisar uma coisa no google." (Let me search something on google).
In portuguese you can't just go "Deixa eu *googlear* uma coisa."
I was watching your video at 1.5 speed and I can understand japanese. Actually I always watch anime at 2x speed, because I have really short breaks during the day... It's not so difficult to understand languages by listening. You just can't speak like them.
I didn't expect to see Portuguese in a high ranking, because we make a point of clearly pronouncing phonemes, I think it's a very clear language. At least PT-BR. I can't understand PT-PT.
My boy Roman (NFKRZ) looks like he got caught up in the Portuguese gangs with those tats.
It was deliberate move
Rappers from these languages are always on another level-
Trisha Paytas speaking English fast af is a language on its own 😅But French speak fast. I’m learning French and god damn they speak fast
I don't think we speak fast, it's more like we shorten many words so the sentence is shorter because of the shorten words. (that's my opinion)
When you don't know or at least accustomed to the language it seems faster than usual. I'm a Turk who speaks Japanese and while during my first days learning Japanese, it sounded crazy fast to me, but not anymore. On the contrary, as a speaker of three languages stated here (Turkish, English and Japanese) I find Greek really fast...specially its news (Greek TV can be watched from some parts of the country).
17:40 Interesting... except "estrada" is not Spanish!
estaba buscando este comentario... y si no, lo iba a escribir yo jajaja "estrada" XD eso es italiano creo
@@joforgefe12 Portuguese i think
@@joforgefe12 Jaja, creo que sí, es italiano. ¡Y se supone que Olly habla castellano con fluidez!
What? Estrada IS a word in Spanish
@@mucanan It turns out that you're right. I've lived in Spain for 35 years and have never heard it used, as far as I can remember. ChatGPT says the following:
Yes, estrada is indeed a Spanish word, though it is not commonly used in everyday speech. It generally refers to a raised platform or stage, similar to the word estrado (which is more common). Both terms describe an elevated area used for public speaking, performances, or ceremonies. However, estrado is preferred in modern Spanish, while estrada may appear more often in historical or formal contexts, or in certain regional dialects.
In summary:
Estrado: Commonly used to refer to a stage or raised platform.
Estrada: Less common, but still recognised, with the same meaning..
Now you have to make the top 10 fastest written languages in the world
4:50
Or is it?
-Vsauce
I've always noticed that about Turkish. Each sentence is a rapid-fire burst. It totally makes sense to me now that I know they put the verbs at the end!
Interesting. I thought that as an agglutinative language it can go almost anywhere.
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I have been trying to learn russian for awhile and i would say russian is spoken pretty fast by natives, years back in highschool i was trying to learn japanese and i noticed a much easier time understanding native japanese speakers saying words i knew compared to russian
This is very interesting, specially as someone that speaks way too fast in my native language hahaha. I'm Brazilian, so I'm a native speaker of portuguese. I also know how to speak English (obviously) and Italian. The examples that were showed were actually easy to understand, and even easier with subtitles. That should be a sign for everyone to not be discouraged when facing these languages, because we eventually get used to speed.
Now, this video is actually even more interesting to me, because I'm learning french currently and I started learning japanese some years ago but stopped because of time. Currently, speed in french is only a problem with words I don't yet know and when someone doesn't have a very clear pronunciation. On the other side of the coin, japanese was hell for me not because of speed but because of the fonetic nature of it. You see, the language is composed of syllables, not letters. So "Japan" in hiragana is にほん and in kanji it's 日本 , pronounced "nihon". You can see how its hard to follow spoken japanese even with subtitles, because you have to match the sound to the written syllable after it's completely said. And with kanji, it's matching a whole syllable or word with one symbol that changes meaning and pronunciation depending on context. Japanese is fast but for me the worse part is reading it at that same pace.
I've been learning Japanese for a while and I wondered if Japanese was going to be up there. But what's interesting is that you are very right about the effect of it. Now that you mention it, I can see that it's fast, but it's not something that really registers with your brain. It really is about the meaning. I will say that all of the syllables make it very difficult to find your place again once you start to get lost in a sentence.
Estrada is in Portuguese not Spanish and then later in the audio none of the things the lady was saying was matching the subtitles at all 😂😂
estrada exists in spanish but it doesnt mean street
Truth is that he needs content. And, as Englishman does, they can make anything look like it is real. There's no such thing as the fastest language, you can speak any language at any speed.
@@LAJAPOf course you can speak languages faster or slower but on average some are statistically proven to be faster than others. It’s noticeable on an anecdotal level too. It’s not a conspiracy theory.
@@InvinciblePythonEddy Read your contradiction. How do you statistically prove a language is faster than the next one, if anyone of its natives can speak it faster or slower at any time, in many different contexts? Who proved it statistically? Point us to that study. Is it statistically proved or anecdotal? Which is it? No wonder you had to bring up "conspiracy theory". I guess I was lucky, you could have thought I was being anti-semitic. I bet you've got all sorts of keywords that you've been taught to throw at others when someone calls your bullshit out.
@@LAJAP Don’t you know what on average means? Let me lay it out for you. A group of people within a certain language can and will speak at a certain speed naturally, but can periodically speak faster or slower depending on factors such as environment, emotion or stylistic choice. This will happen across languages however, some languages note a considerably faster speed even at normal rates of speech than others. Of course a Japanese person can speak at a snails pace or a Chinese person like a bullet train, that doesn’t mean all languages are consistently spoken at whatever whimsical speed one individual decides to spit their words out. There is literally a study on it, if you want to know the methodology just google which languages are fastest. There is also a plethora of videos which cover language speed and document peoples anecdotal experiences. Why are you even responding, you have no argument.
I'm brazilian and i actually used to speak too fast when i was young. I'm from the north east part and we tend to speak like that naturally (i think a similar would be Texas in EUA)
But i was so over it man, i had to change my accent and i did🤖
at 0:44 you say mandarin Chinese is the most spoken language in the world. Although its the most spoken native language, english is actually is the most spoken. but thats a common mistake. anyways nice video
I actually thought the Italian examples you used were quite slow, maybe because they were explaining a concept or teaching, the average person talking casually to a friend can be faster than that.
Maybe this explains why most English speaking sounds slow to me so I watch most videos at 2x speed.
check out Tamil and Singhala if you want to hear fast. All other languages I've heard can't even hold a candle.
සිංහල🤔
Winderson Nunes on the thumbnail made me curious, Fubuki on the start about japanese language made me wheezee
Great video! Very interesting!
6:27 😂😂😂BB ki vines kinda caught me off-guard
Love from india❤️🇮🇳🪷
poore yt mein isko bb ki vines hi mila
I'm realyy impressed! You classified correctly ours differents musics, especialy samba, pagode and axé music - P.Ss: Thaks for bring Gerônimo's voice
I'm a simple guy, I see someone from my state, I click, I like.
I struggle with Portuguese because of the speed. People don't think I am fluent in Portuguese because of the speed, but I am. I just need more practice.