They found Japanese and Spanish, often described as “fast languages,” clocked the greatest number of syllables per second. The “slowest” language in the set was Mandarin, followed closely by German.
There unfortunately have not been any wide-ranging studies on language speed. One 2011 study from the Université de Lyon looked at 7 languages, which reported the order as Japanese (7.84 syllables per second), Spanish (7.82), French (7.18), Italian (6.99), English (6.19), German (5.97) and Mandarin (5.18).
Before diving into details of why Python is popular in the mainstream despite being slow, I will briefly explain how or why Python is slow in nature in terms of performance and speed as compared to other popular programming languages like C, C++, and Java.
A recent French study of the density and speed of 20 languages found Mandarin to be one of the slowest languages examined (in a group including French, English, and Japanese), in terms of syllables spoken per minute.
Some of the languages in the world that no one ever knows or heard of (except linguists and historians) are in a very critical state – Tsuu t'ina language (also known as Sarcee) with only 80 native speakers, Ongota with 12 native speakers, Liki with 11 native speakers and Taushiro (1 native speaker).
The languages that takes the number 1 place in our list and therefore, the most spoken first language in the world is, by far, Mandarin Chinese. Mandarin is only one of the many Chinese dialects spoken in China. However, it is officially considered the Official Language of the People's Republic of China.
What is the rarest language to speak? Kaixana is an unknown language spoken because it only has one speaker left today. Kaixana has never been very popular. But it had 200 speakers in the past.
Korean vs Chinese: Which one's the easiest to learn? In conclusion, the Mandarin Chinese writing system is far more complex than its Korean counterpart. Hangul is far easier to learn than Hanzi. But, while Chinese grammar is rather predictable and stable, Korean grammar has some extra layers of difficulty.
When linguists rank languages for ease of learning, both Japanese and Mandarin are toward the top (Category 5), especially for native English speakers. However, since you'll be learning a language with brand new sounds and symbols no matter what, they'll both be at about the same level regarding difficulty.
In general, Japanese may take longer to learn due to its three writing systems (hiragana, kanji, and katakana). However, there are many similarities between Japanese and Chinese pronunciation so if you have prior knowledge of Chinese then learning Japanese may not be overly difficult.
As we've already mentioned, Japanese is considered the fastest language in the world. It is always mentioned as the first on the list. So, here are 6 of the fastest spoken languages in the world, based on the average number of syllables spoken per second (SPS): Japanese - 7.84 SPS.
One of the most important factors to consider when ranking programming languages is speed. C++ is the fastest language according to a number of measures, including compilation time and execution speed. In this section, we will look at some ways in which C++ beats out other programming languages in terms of performance.
The easiest languages for English speakers to learn are: Danish, Dutch, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, Swedish, and French. The US State Department lists these languages as Category I languages. This means they are similar to English culturally and/or linguistically.
1. Mandarin Chinese. Interestingly, the hardest language to learn is also the most widely spoken native language in the world.
Thanks to its phonetic alphabet and more simplistic grammar rules, Korean is not the most challenging Asian language to learn. Chinese on the other hand is much more widely spoken. This means that finding study materials and practice partners would be easier.
Unlike other East-Asian languages, Korean isn't a tonal language. This means, that the meaning of the word doesn't change, regardless of what your accent is like. This makes learning Korean much easier than Japanese. Japanese has 46 letters in its alphabet.
Other people who enjoy grammar and grammar-based languages find Korean the easiest since it doesn't have the complicated Chinese characters, and some weird geniuses may enjoy Japanese the most as it is the most challenging – difficult grammar AND Chinese characters.
Although all Asian languages are relatively harder for English native speakers to learn, Vietnamese is one of the easier one compared to Korean, Chinese, Japanese and so on. It is because Vietnamese adopts Latin alphabet and no plural forms and articles.
While both languages can be challenging for English speakers, Mandarin is generally seen as being more difficult. This is due to the fact that there are thousands of Chinese characters, while Arabic only includes 28 letters in its alphabet.
Chinese isn't all bad news, it's near complete lack of tense, mood, gender, grammatical number and inflections means it is grammatically much simpler than Spanish for all but the more advanced nuances.
Ithkuil is an experimental constructed language created by John Quijada. It is designed to express more profound levels of human cognition briefly yet overtly and clearly, particularly about human categorization. It is a cross between an a priori philosophical and a logical language.
There are currently 570 known extinct languages, with some notable examples being Eyak, Yana, Tunica and Tillamook – which are all mostly from Native American tribes.