Fact · Languages and accents
6.19syllables per second
In the same 2011 study, English speakers averaged 6.19 syllables per second when reading the translated texts aloud at a normal rate.
Checked against its source on October 17, 2026
In the source's own words
“English 0.91 (± 0.04) 6.19 (± 0.16) 1.08 (± 0.08)”
A cross-language perspective on speech information rate, François Pellegrino et al., Language (Linguistic Society of America), vol. 87, no. 3, 2011, Table 1, English row.
Open the original- What it measures
- Fifty-nine speakers of seven languages read 20 texts aloud at normal speech rates. The English texts were the source passages, and the other languages were translations of them. The figure is a mean across speakers and recordings.
- What it does not show
- Read speech, not conversation, and syllables are not words. The English figure is for British English, which the study names as its English variety. Do not read it as a words-per-minute figure for American English.