Russian - a fast spoken language? (2024)

grodmannen said:

Is russian a fast or slow spoken language? How many syllables per second does the average russian speak?

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It's a medium-speed. Compared to Spanish, it is about 1/2 the speed.
But then, everyone's personal spoken style is different.
there are people we compare to machine guns, and there are those who really savor every word.

I'd rather agree with morzh.

And, comparing with English that is less complicated and has mostly shorter words and construction, it would take sometimes much time to express the same idea in Russian than in English.

BTW, I wonder if there is any scientific research on the relative speech rate in different languages?
On the one hand, we should admit the speech rate depends on one's individual manner and on some specific occasions (e.g. deep thinking vs lack of time)...
On the other hand, we should agree some languages are generally faster than others. Well-known examples of fast languages are French, Italian and Japanese.

Although it may be a sort of off-topic, I want to tell a short story.
A few years ago I saw two middle-aged men in a public bus in my home city of Russia. They spoke an unknown language to each other (I mean, I could not recognise completely what language they spoke, and even to what language family it belonged). But I was surprised a lot by the fastness of their speech. I'd say it was the fastest language I've ever heard! It sounded just as a continuous sequence of tongue-twisters to me. Unfortunatelly, I have no idea what was the language they spoke, I could only guess from their appearance they were either from Nothern Caucasus or somewhere from Middle East or Central Asia. The language did not remind any of the Turkic languages by its pronunciation (moreover, although Turkic languages are considered being fast, their speech seemed even faster), and it was definitely not Georgian - that's all I could conclude.

PS one more thing I noticed then - their language contained lots of sibilants (like SH / ZH sounds).

LilianaB said:

Russian is definitely slower than Polish, speaking about Slavic languages. It is a little faster than Swedish, I think, about 10%. This is just based on my impression, so please don't take it for granted.

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Russian is even slower than Ukrainian. (one would think two languages that are related so closely would be on a par with each other, but....)
Especially Ukrainian spoken by rural women, it is just...almost as Spanish.

Moro12 said:

BTW, I wonder if there is any scientific research on the relative speech rate in different languages?
On the one hand, we should admit the speech rate depends on one's individual manner and on some specific occasions (e.g. deep thinking vs lack of time)...
On the other hand, we should agree some languages are generally faster than others. Well-known examples of fast languages are French, Italian and Japanese.

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Sure, this issue has been thoroughly investigated. The main conclusion is that the less information density per syllable of a language, the more syllables are pronounced per time unit (the faster is the speech). But in all the languages speed of information transfer is more or less equal and depends rather on the nature of human brain than on the the peculiarity of a language.

Moro12 said:

That's an interesting approach, thank you!
But we still have examples when even closely related languages slightly differ in their speech rate (as stated above about Russian vs Ukrainian)...

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"Slight" difference is very subjective thing. For me any language I don't understand good is too fast.

Just found a very interesting article on this subject:
http://www.personal.rdg.ac.uk/~llsroach/phon2/tempopr.htm

Maroseika said:

"Slight" difference is very subjective thing. For me any language I don't understand good is too fast.

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That might be a good explanation, indeed!
I've just thought: why we have so many examples of languages faster than ours, and quite a few examples of languages which are slower. Is Russian really among the slowest languages? It's hard to believe it

Moro12 said:

That's an interesting approach, thank you!
But we still have examples when even closely related languages slightly differ in their speech rate (as stated above about Russian vs Ukrainian)...

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Somehow I think that if you compare a TV anchors, or heads of states, speaking Russian and Ukrainian, you will find out their speeches to be of comparable, if not equal (within the difference attributable to personal speaking manners) speeds.
I think that the differences within closely related languages may be attributed to the difference of ethnic cultures. Some cultures are more prone to communication (more to South, Ukraine) and some - less (more to North, central Russian). People who like to speak more, since the brain activity is about the same, will say more "fillers" or words that do not have a lot of informational load, like lots of extra embellishments.

But then, if you look at the various people of the same ethnicity speaking Russian, you will also find out that some people (from Siberia) speak slower, and use less embellishments, almost as though they want to make every word count, and people from central Russia speak faster.

People in Southern Russia (Kuban / Stavropol) who speak southern Russian dialect (and who are of Ukrainian descent) speak quite a bit faster than people from, say, Moscow, or Yaroslavl, as if they spoke Ukrainian (they do use elements of Ukrainian speech).

So, geographical / climate influenced ethnic / national traits will make people speak the same language with various speeds.

grodmannen said:

Alright thanks for your answers.. Ofcourse they speak slower and are easier to understand in siberia where nobody would never ever want to go.. Now, the question is if russian is faster or slower than english?

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I suggest you watch a few YouTube videos and decide for yourself. I'd say Russian is about 1/4 slower.

morzh said:

Also I believe UK English is slower than the American English.

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(You have that the wrong way round, Morzh: AE is considerably slower than UKE)

LilianaB said:

I think Russian is definitely slower than English. Some BBC speakers speak quite fast too, not just AE speakers. I think it is just slightly faster than Swedish.

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I am agree with you.
think that Spanish is very fast language

gullia said:

I am (agree - глагол) agree with you.
I think that Spanish is a very fast language.

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