fffast languages vs. s-s-slow languages

[bluebeard]

Oh hey y'all.

I found this interesting article in Scientific American (link!) and had to share. :D It's only three paragraphs long, so I won't bother to copypasta or summarize here.

My thoughts (put under spoiler-tag for incoherent rambling):

[Spoiler (click to open)]* Ofc Spanish is spoken faster than English. Or at least, my dialect is compared to the English spoken

Comments

[lilacsigil]

Young women from Los Angeles have the fastest English I've ever heard!

[di_glossia]

Cuban and Puerto Rican dialects are some of the fastest Spanish I've ever heard, because, as you said, words are slurred together.

In general, I would say that Southern accents are slower than more northern accents as well as rural accents being slower than urban accents. New Yorkers are typically defined as speaking both rudely and quickly, while Deep South accents are characterized by slow speech and drawling. I have no opinion on any UK , New Zealand, Canadian, or Australian accents. They seem neither fast nor slow to me. I don't really know: I think it has more to do with personal preference than dialect.

Btw, y'all is mostly an American thing and typical of Southern dialects, AAVE, and some Western American dialects. It's not something the vast majority of native English speakers would say in any seriousness. I don't even know if the vast majority would recognize it as a word.

[bluebeard]

loool I love "y'all". English needs a plural "you", let's be real. :3

[ameliorate23]

Native English speaker here, from the Southern United States. I can, of course, only speak for myself, but I think most would agree with me:

Y'all is a pretty common term. It fills an obvious need in the English language, and with technology being what it is nowadays, y'all is definitely no longer exclusive to the South.

I don't think anyone would find you being a wannabe and/or offensive for using the word occasionally. As long as you're not using it in formal situations (because it's still not acceptable there), I think most people wouldn't even notice it. Of course, if you adopt a fake Southern accent, pepper the word into natural conversation as much as possible, or start wearing a cowboy hat - that's a different story. ;P

[bluebeard]

lol i can't fake accents. every time I try to imitate British speakers or Southern US speakers a bunch of fail comes out. I'm amazed at people who can switch accents like a boss; I can't at all. I'm stuck with my Cuban one, lawl.

as for formal situations, I rarely find myself in those, and since at school I study Linguistics (not to mention a few of my profs are American) no1curr and/or notices, hehe. but mostly I use it online, since it's pretty standard to find Americans in forums, LJ comms. and so on and so forth, so I've never had someone be all like "y'all ain't from around here so don't be speakin' like us, now" or something, hehehe. /stereotyping, sorry

[ubykhlives]

English has some next-level (fucked-up imo :D) syllable structure that's like (C)(C)(C)V(C)(C)(C) or whatever the hell (I can't remember 100%, don't quote me on this). I wonder if Polish is hella slow too? Its consonant clusters are best described (IMO) as "consonantalclusterfuck" (try saying that 5 times fast).

Look at Georgian or Nuxálk then try to tell me Polish is tough. Georgian has (C)(C)(C)(C)(C)(C)(C)(C)V(C)(C)(C)(C)(C) - not all consonants can appear in all positions, but gvbrdɣvnis "he's plucking us" (CCCCCCCCVC) and ancxls "to the bad-tempered one (VCCCCC) are quite acceptable Georgian words. Nuxálk doesn't even have a clear syllable structure; though most syllables have a vowel nucleus, all-consonant words like xłp̓x̣ʷłtłpłłskʷc̓ "he had had in his possession a bunchberry plant" are entirely possible. Even Polish looks positively pedestrian by comparison.

[akibare]

I recently saw a documentary that took place largely in Georgian (it was about setting up some electric power grids in Tbilisi) and I have to admit that my mind was blown. Sounded cool though.

Not to mention all those humpy letters! People can read that?? (of course they can...)

In English I think "strengths" has the highest consonant to vowel ratio and that's pretty measly.

(edited to fix my horrible spelling)

[ubykhlives]

Not to mention all those humpy letters! People can read that??

I think the Georgian alphabet is the most beautiful writing system of them all! I have a Georgian friend and her handwriting is just gorgeous - I could read it all day. Want to talk about what people can read, I'm surprised anyone can read Armenian. A lovely alphabet, except that all the letters look EXACTLY THE SAME.

In English I think "strengths" has the highest consonant to vowel ratio and that's pretty measly.

True, though texts has a larger final cluster (the largest possible in English AFAIK).

[bluebeard]

lmao i always forget georgian exists. i want to erase from my mind that that language has so many consonants. @_@

i had no idea bout Nuxálk though. o.o

[sollersuk]

Re your PS, not all speakers of Castilian use "thetheo". In the South of Spain it's "seseo", but there is also something that drove me bananas trying to understand people - "s" turns into "h" or vanishes almost completely ("eto cueta" for "esto cuesta"). And in Galicia, even when speaking Castilian as opposed to Gallego "y" sounds become "j" and I do mean "dzh" - on arrival at the hotel I was very confused at first by reference to "la dzhave", which I didn't immediately recognise as "la llave".

[bluebeard]

hahaha, I know about Andalusia, their dialect is very much like ours, since we aspirate /s/ into /h/ and when I say my name I say "Guidzhermo", not Guiyermo or however it's said in Castilian, hehe.

makes sense, actually; idk if you know this, but a LOT (like, a LOT) of Cubans (esp. in Santiago, which is where I'm from) are descendants of Galicians and Andalusians.

...well, not my ancestors (came from Burgos), but that's besides the point, lol.

[archaicos]

The Argentinean 'sh' sound for ll/y is quite unusual to my ears too. But it turns out that there's some logic behind it when we dive a little into Portuguese: llegar (sp) = chegar (pt), lluvia (sp) = chuva (pt), etc. What a surprise! :)

[dorsetgirl]

I'll second the comments about rural speech being generally slower than urban, and I think that probably takes precedence over regional differences.

From watching foreign-language videos where I knew not a single word of the language, I'd say that Spanish is spoken a lot faster than Swedish (which seems to be slower than English). It took me over an hour of watching a Spanish programme to be able to distinguish individual words from a rolling sea of syllables, whereas with Swedish it was obvious from the start. There's a line where the character says the Swedish for "He's gone to Hedestad" and the town name - I've just timed it, because I'm sad like that - takes him twice as long to say as it would me. This is a successful and intelligent character but in this country speaking like that would get him stereotyped as mentally slow.