Comment by daxfohl
5 years ago
I've noticed most Russians I work with also speak slowly. I'm curious whether it is difficulty with English pronunciation or whether speaking slowly is part of Russian culture. I'm guessing more the latter, as the the things they say are also frequently quite concise and to the point, no filler words, few adverbs, so no need to speak quickly. Do Russians speak more quickly when speaking Russian?
I lived in Russia for a year and yes, they speak much faster in Russian than English. In particular if they are between just Russians and know they don't need to speak slowly to be understood. But I think it's the same for every language, people speak faster in their mother tong.
Guessing they talk at 39 bits of info per second.
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/09/human-speech-may-hav...
This reminds me of some research[0] that found speakers of less information-dense languages speak faster, and vice versa, with the effect that all of the studied languages had roughly the same information transmission rate.
[0] https://www.newscientist.com/article/2215202-all-languages-h...