I recently read an article from The Language Nerds, who post on social media. The facts I have listed are their results from a recent study by Pellegrino, Coupé, and Marco. This study is about how linguists measure the speed of languages by how many syllables are articulated per second or per minute. This study doesn't include data from all the languages of the world, but this is what they have discovered so far. I have included the link to the article at the bottom of this blog.
Japanese is the fastest recording language. It has a rate of 7.84 syllables per second! Spanish is right behind Japanese and is nearly as fast with a rate of 7.82 syllables per second. French lags just a little far behind with a rate of 7.18 syllables per second. Italian is relatively slower than Spanish and French with a rate of 6.99 syllables per second. English is among the slower languages with a rate of 6.19 syllables per second. Before last is German with a speed of 5.97 syllables per second. Mandarin is the slowest recorded language with a rate as low as 5.18 syllables per second.
I actually would have presumed that the Asian languages were faster but apparently, languages with either a complex tone (4 or more tones), or complex consonant clusters, tend to be slower while languages with no tone, or a very simple tone system tend to be faster.
Reference: https://thelanguagenerds.com/list-of-the-fastest-spoken-languages-in-the-world/
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