University of Lyon researchers François Pellegrino, Christophe Coupé, and Egidio Marsico didn’t travel the world, nor did they survey every single language, but back in 2010, they did use the process above to determine the speech information rate of seven of the world’s most spoken languages: English, French, Italian, Japanese, Spanish, Mandarin, and German.
English came out on top, but not by much. Most of languages grouped pretty closely together, however, Japanese lagged behind the rest.
Interestingly, the languages that conveyed the least amount of information per syllable, like Spanish, Japanese, and French, tended to be spoken at a faster rate. This allowed these languages (apart from Japanese) to deliver a similar amount of information compared to more meaning-dense languages like Mandarin and English.
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