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Originally r/DataisBeautiful
Cowards left out Navajo.
Poor Thai down there at the bottom, speaking slowly and transferring information slowly.
Thai, the PNY USB stick of languages, apparently.
Actually fewer syllables per second is good, means you’re spending less effort speaking. It’s the ratio of information/syllables you want to maximize. Which means German/English/Mandarin/Vietnamese are roughly on par as the most “efficient” languages.
Some languages have fewer vowel sounds while others have an insane number (in Europe that would be Danish).
Thai has a lot, so speakers need to speak more slowly so the listener has time to distinguish words. But it also means that you can have more words per syllable.
It's not about efficiency per se - it's data and error correction
LMFAO PNY USB that's poetic
As someone who speaks both French and English, I'm surprised to see French as leading "information density" language. Most French terms have been incorporated into English. Language tends to be behind on technology terms. Language doesn't have any noticeable difference in short syllable common words to English. It also seems to me that French speakers have an easier time in being vague. I have the impression that English is more precise.
Looking at the two curves, it looks like they are pretty close but French edges out English because of the speed it's spoken at.
Even when it was fresh in my mind, I was never able to follow French tv because they just go so fast.
Both were massive empires. Makes sense that imperialism would put selective pressure on language. Historically you're either limited in words by space on a paper or what can be easily repeated by messengers.
Wonder how Thai is the zipfile of languages.
It is multiplexed with five tones and a variety of different registers to signify relationship, status, and variable interplay between the two based on situation.
I am pretty skeptical about these results in general. I would like to see the original research paper, but they usually
And then there's the question of how do you measure the amount of information conveyed in natural languages using bits...
Yeah, the results are mostly likely very skewed.
So I did a quick pass through the paper, and I think it's more or less bullshit. To clarify, I think the general conclusion (different languages have similar information densities) is probably fine. But the specific bits/s numbers for each language are pretty much garbage/meaningless.
First of all, speech rates is measured in number of canonical syllables, which is a) unfair to non-syllabic languages (e.g. (arguably) Japanese), b) favours (in terms of speech rate) languages that omit syllables a lot. (like you won't say "probably" in full, you would just say something like "prolly", which still counts as 3 syllables according to this paper).
And the way they calculate bits of information is by counting syllable bigrams, which is just.... dumb and ridiculous.
Alright, but dismissing the study as “pretty much bullshit" based on a quick read-through seems like a huge oversimplification. Using canonical syllables as a measure is actually a widely accepted linguistic standard, designed precisely to make fair comparisons across languages with different structures, including languages like Japanese. It’s not about unfairly favoring any language but creating a consistent baseline, especially when looking at large, cross-linguistic patterns.
And on the syllable omission point, like “probably” vs. “prolly," I mean, sure, informal speech varies, but the study is looking at overall trends in speech rate and information density, not individual shortcuts in casual conversation. Those small variations certainly don’t turn the broader findings into bullshit.
As for the bigram approach, it’s a reasonable proxy to capture information density. They’re not trying to recreate every phonological or grammatical nuance; that would be way beyond the scope and would lose sight of the larger picture. Bigrams offer a practical, statistically valid method for comparing across languages without having to delve into the specifics of every syllable sequence in each language.
This isn’t about counting every syllable perfectly but showing that despite vast linguistic diversity, there’s an overarching efficiency in how languages encode information. The study reflects that and uses perfectly acceptable methods to do so.
Well I did clarify I agree that the overarching point of this paper is probably fine...
widely accepted linguistic standard
I am not a linguist so apologise for my ignorance about how things are usually done. (Also, thanks for educating me.) But on the other hand just because it is the accepted way doesn't mean it is right in this case. Especially when you consider the information rate is also calculated from syllables.
syllable bigrams
Ultimately this just measures how quickly the speaker can produce different combinations of sounds, which is definitely not what most people would envision when they hear "information in language". For linguists who are familiar with the methodology, this might be useful data. But the general public will just get the wrong idea and make baseless generalisations - as evidenced by comments under this post. All in all, this is bad science communication.
But the general public will just get the wrong idea and make baseless generalisations - as evidenced by comments under this post. All in all, this is bad science communication.
Perhaps, but to be clear, that's on The Economist, not the researchers or scholarship. Your criticisms are valid to point out, but they aren't likely to be significant enough to change anything meaningful in the final analysis. As far as the broad conclusions of the paper, I think the visualization works fine.
What you're asking for in terms of methods that will capture some of the granularity you reference would need to be a separate study. And that study would probably not be a corrective to this paper. Rather, it would serve to "color between the lines" that this study establishes.
I take your point without complaint, but I still think you're an alien for saying "prolly"
I mean, probs. It's right there. Use that if you have to
This conjecture explains the results surprisingly well. If the original was written in French, which then got translated to English, which was then used as the basis of translation for the other languages that would explain the results entirely.
So Thai is the current meta
This was one of the weirdest things I had to learn when I was learning spanish. The sounds are much faster but the information density was similar. For me as an english native speaker it felt like I was listening to a machine gun at first. Eventually I trained my ear and now both languages sound the same speed.
This is also why, to me, rapidly spoken natural Spanish and Japanese sound oddly similar if I hear it out of "the corner" of my ear, so to speak.
Which is funny cause I kinda speak Spanish lol
I recently had a conversation with a native Spanish speaker who lived in Japan and spoke Japanese fairly fluently. He said the exact same thing, it was surprising how similar they can be in this regard
Spanish and Japanese use the same sounds. For the most part, anyway; there are probably a few exceptions. This was unexpected and utterly blew my mind as a native Spanish speaker when I took Japanese lessons.
Take the longest, most complicated Japanese word. Write it out in romaji (Latin letters). And ask a native Spanish speaker to pronounce it. One who knows nothing of Japanese. They'll pronounce it pretty much correctly. I was fascinated.
I always thought that English was an efficient language.
Switch to Rust. I speak Rust btw.
On arch
Nah NixOS
Syllables can vary in length. Japanese has very short syllables while English has rather long ones. Counting phonemes would make more sense
So if I'm reading this right, French (closely followed by English) tends to convey the most info per unit time?
Yes but they also utilize smell.
As a french, I'm very surprised by this, as when I see a text in French side-by-side with its English translation, the English version is usually shorter. It may be a difference between speech and text, but it's still surprising.
I really thought the information density of French was pretty low, compared to English or Breton, for example.
Written French is slow (needs more words )
Spoken French IS faster
In Finnish, I can simply ask, "Juoksenneltaisiinko?" whereas in English, I have to say, "Should we run around aimlessly?"
Traipse?
That's the full sentence asking if you want to run around aimlessly.
What produces the stretched graphs like Italian and German? What do these humps mean?
Variability in the length of words, loads of very short and very long words? Just a guess
Inaccurate for Italian because 50% of the language is conveyed by auditory volume, hand gestures and body language .... and espresso, lots and lots of espresso.
Turkish is also inaccurate because 25% of the language is in the eyes .... those intense eyes where you can't tell if someone is excited, energetic, full of life or psychotic / murderous.
Yeah but 30% of the information in French are the "uhhh's" lmao
They solved that by not pronouncing half the language.
Speaking of "data is beautiful", IMO a 2D scatter plot would be very useful for visualizing this relationship. This chart does provide the distribution for each language, as opposed to just the average, but at the expense of making correlation (or lack thereof) difficult to see.
Also, the ratio of the largest to the smallest value for syllables per second and for bits per second appears to be fairly similar. I have to eyeball values but it looks like Japanese : Thai is 8.0 : 4.7 for syllables per second (so 1.7) whereas French : Thai is 48 : 34 (so 1.4) for bits per second.
For each language, the distribution of syllable rate looks very much like the distribution of bit rate. I would like to see a chart of bits per syllable. Oh, and I wonder how this affects reading speed and the rate of information transfer via reading, especially for different spoken languages that use similar written characters.
The French/English/German curves are interesting, given the relationships between them.
I wonder if this implies English has more in common with French than German.
Or how the German and Italian curves are so similar, does that reflect a similarity in language or in how it's used (cultural)?