Do they just speak faster? Do the Indian words/pronunciation flow better/faster than English does? And they are simply trying to match the cadence?
I’m curious even with the different ways of stressing syllables if there is also a causal link between population density and speaking speed, similar to walking speed differences measured in rural and urban environments. Like if there is some mechanism like walking quickly to get through timed crosswalks vs larger group conversations with less time to get your point across or jump in without interrupting.
Edit: I also noticed as an English only speaker when speaking with Indians who speak English and one or more Indian languages they will sometimes repeat the last sentence you say as you finish saying it as a way to jump into the conversation or indicate agreement or having something to say but I’m not sure if that is culturally Indian or more broadly Asian, etc. if anyone has some insight into that language style.
One way of classifying languages is grouping them into stress-timed, syllable-timed and “mora”-timed languages.
Stress timed languages (like English) are ones where the time between stressed syllables is roughly the same. Take the phrase “I went to the store with my friend John”. Most native English speakers will stress “went”, “store”, “friend” and “John”. It might not be a big difference, but you’ll notice the “to the” between “went” and “store” is rushed, and that there’s a sort of gap between “friend” and “John” since both are stressed. (Also, if you were to modify that slightly and say “I went to the store with my friend named John”, the time between “friend” and “John” wouldn’t change much at all, you’d just slip “named” into that gap.)
Many Romance languages are seen as syllable-timed, where each syllable takes the same amount of time. In French that phrase is “Je suis allé au magasin avec mon ami John”, that’s 14 syllables, all roughly the same timing. In Spanish it’s “Fui a la tienda con mi amigo John”, 12 syllables. Unless you’re really drawing attention to one of the words, every syllable there gets roughly the same timing.
Japanese is mora timed, which is pretty similar to being syllable timed, except that when you encounter double-letters they double the length of the syllable. So, “Just a moment please” is “Chottomatte kudasai”, where the syllables with double-t letters take twice as long. The cities Tōkyō (two syllables), Ōsaka (three syllables) and Kawasaki (four syllables) all take the same amount of time to say because the “ō” symbol means that letter gets double the length of the standard “o”.
The 4 most widely spoken languages in India are Hindi (way out in front with 44% of the population speaking it as a first language), followed by Bengali, Marathi and Telugu (with about 6-8% each) The first 3 are all Indo-Aryan languages, and Telugu is a Dravidian language. The 3 Indo-Aryan languages are considered to be syllable-timed and Telugu is considered to be mora-timed.
IMO, what makes Indian-inflected English seem fast is that they’re adopting the syllable / mora timing from their primary language and using it in English. That means they spend less time on syllables / words that English speakers would stress and more time on the un-stressed syllables. The overall timing of what they say is probably similar, but in evening out the length of the syllables, they take time away from the syllables that other English speakers naturally slow down to stress. Since you tend to notice the stressed words more, since they’re rushed it seems like the entire sentence is rushed.
I remember seeing a linguist doing research into the actual timing of long Japanese vowels and finding that they weren’t actually double the length, more like 1.5 times as long (or 1.7 or something like that). I’ll have to see if I can find the article or paper again.
Ok, so I heard a thing a long time ago about information density in languages, and that there’s a specific amount of information conveyed per second which is pretty consistent across languages, even when the number of sounds is higher or lower. Which means that a single word in English, for instance, would convey more information than a single word in Hindi.
Is there anything to that? Or was that just nonsense?
Someone posted a link to just that topic here. Apparently almost all languages transmit about 39 bits per second of data. Italians use 9 syllables per second, Germans only about 5-6, but both convey the same amount of information per second. But, not all syllables are equal. Japanese has about 5 bits per syllable, English has about 7 bits per syllable. The most information dense language per syllable is apparently Vietnamese with about 8 bits per syllable.
Apparently though, the bottleneck is the brain. The end result seems to be that languages that have fewer “bits of data” per syllable say those syllables more quickly, and the ones with fewer bits of data per syllable say those syllables more slowly, so that the average is about 39 bits per second no matter what the language.
Having said that, I often listen to podcasts sped up to 1.5x speed, and I listen to podcasts while doing other things, so I guess the bottleneck is probably on the sending side rather than the receiving side.
Does anyone know how the amount of information is actually derived? The article just says “researchers calculated”
Podcasts, being prerecorded and edited, don’t really fit this model. It’s more for a conversation with a back and forth where both interlocutors don’t know ahead of time what the other person will say. So they need to observe/listen, reflect while also coming up with answers and putting effort into being properly understood. So basically the natural context in which inter human communication evolved.
Ok, so I heard a thing a long time ago about information density in languages, and that there’s a specific amount of information conveyed per second which is pretty consistent across languages, even when the number of sounds is higher or lower.
This is true.
Which means that a single word in English, for instance, would convey more information than a single word in Hindi.
I don’t think that’s the right interpretation. There are words in English that would require sentences to be made for each if conveyed in a different language. But the same is true vice-versa.
Have a look at subtitles for movies from one language to any other. Translators struggle conveying what should be paragraph long sentences of context behind a single word for one language. Do not get me started on double speak.
Oh, interesting. I hadn’t considered that there would be variances in information density within a language, but that makes sense; “truth” is a very loaded concept that means a lot of different things in context, even though it’s only one syllable; but on the other hand “authenticity” is five syllables but carries with it a meaning that is a subset of the definition of “truth.”
I guess that’s why subtitling is even possible in different languages; if there were languages with vastly less information density than the source language, they’d need a whole screen just for the captions.
Fairly nonsense If anything I’d say it’s the other way around – there are lots of words in Hindi/Malayalam that you need 5 or 6 English words to describe
It’s not nonsense. Information density isn’t about number of words. It’s about duration and complexity of communication. And it is fairly consistent across all languages. Some languages take 3 words to say something the other can say in one, but those 3 words probably take a similar amount of brainpower and time to communicate as the one word.
I’m not an expert on this, and I’m not trying to sound I know everything, but I’m an Indian and have spent 20 years of my life speaking Hindi, which is one of the widely known and spoken language in India, especially in North India. I think this is related to how the language is structured and the way consonants and vowels are used in the “Lipi” (I wasn’t able to find an English word for it, but you think of it as the set of symbols with which the language is written.) of Indian languages. The Lipi for Hindi, Sanskrit, Marathi, Bhojpuri, Maithli and many other languages is Devnagari. And It has a somewhat complex structure to it, more complex than English. Like English has 5 vowels and are used directly in the middle of consonants. But in Devnagari, you can see there are traditionally 13 vowels and every vowel can be used independently or dependently in a word, which means you can have a vowel appended or pretended to each consonant, and that will produce a different sound. A kid in India in his early age is taught to identify each of that sound and he uses all that early knowledge and learning, all his life when he talks. This allows him to create and follow different sound patterns and makes his speech continuous and flow-full, which I think you’re referring to as being fast. I find other languages like Mandarin has a similar structure, and makes me learn about them even more.
Vowel has 2 definitions that conflict.
One definition is the letters ‘a’, ‘e’, ‘i’, ‘o’, and ‘u’ (and sometimes ‘y’). The other is the speech sound without any blockage or constricting of the vocal tract. Vowel letters are used in written English to indicate vowel sounds, but because English is a pain in the ass, there’s no 1 to 1 match between the 5(ish) vowel letters and the 20+ vowel sounds.
I think the guy you responded to was making a joke about how some native English speakers talk
I think there’s a vast difference in south India and north India. South Indians tend to speak a lot faster.
There was a recent paper saying exactly this.
I work in maritime, often alongside Indian counterparts who speak both English to me and Indian to their ship mates.
Yes, they do speak Indian just as fast. Yes, the way they speak English has a lot to do with the cadence of how they speak their native language.
As far as the flow goes, I’ve noticed that Indian does flow better than English just listening to it, but I don’t know enough of it to make that observation with any credibility.
There is no “indian” languaje, there is a myriad of languajes spoken in india, what you might be refering to is hindi, which is very wildly spoken.
I have two indian friends that speak english with each other cause their native languajes are so different that they do no understand each other and one of then do no speak hindi.
I figured that was the case, but I don’t know any of it, so I didn’t know better. Thanks for clarifying.