(Please read the following slowly, and in a West Country accent.) When I talk to my cows, I talk slowly and clearly, in a gentle reassuring tone. If I spoke like a New Yorker on amphetamine, not only would they not understand a word I said, I'm pretty sure they would feel stressed and anxious. Milk yields would fall, and the animals would get skittish and nervous. I'm very much in favour of treating small children with the same consideration as livestock. I feel much the same way as my cattle. I prefer people to speak as if they had all the time in the world; as if they were luxuriating in the pleasure of conversation with me. (Though I don't insist they pat my neck or feed me cake.) People who rattle through their sentences make me feel exhausted and depressed. I am sure people spoke more slowly when I was a child in rural Gloucestershire sixty years ago than when I worked in London. Now I am back in the Cotswolds, where people of my generation still tend to take their time, but I have the impression that youngsters are in too much of a hurry. So what I am wondering is this. Do people speak faster now than in generations past? And if so: is this a continuing trend? Is it allied to urban living? Is the phenomenon a global one? If I were projected a thousand years into the future, would I find that human speech had grown into something like the humming of bees, and that distinguishing individual words was beyond my auditory capacity? I wonder if anyone has attempted to conduct scientifically rigorous research on this vital question. There are recordings of the spoken word going back more than a century. There may be evidence of the duration of theatrical performances in bygone times, or of the length of speeches (of recorded content) delivered in Parliament, etc. The evidence is out there, I feel sure! I would like to know whether others have noticed the phenomenon of verbal acceleration and, if so, whether like me they find it one more instance of the deteriorating quality of modern life.
I've always noticed that the British speak much faster than Americans, and our Southerners speak more slowly than anybody. But most all we ever hear is RP and the occasional Cockney, so I don't know if regional British dialects are less hectic. There is a limit to how quickly the average person can take in verbal information, whether written or spoken. In English it's about 200 words per minute. I have noticed that languages with longer words like Spanish and Italian tend to be spoken faster, which keeps the information flow at about the same rate. French is similar to English, with many monosyllabic words, and most Frenchmen speak at a speed that's comfortable for us. Chinese, on the other hand, has compressed out all the "noise words" like articles and prepositions, which makes it denser in information. And it is indeed spoken more slowly. I've measured an average of seven Chinese syllables to translate ten English syllables, and the ratio of speech speed is just about the same. I doubt that people in the future will be able to take in information at a greater speed without our brains evolving. I know "speed readers" can exceed that rate, but I've been told that they process the pages photographically instead of verbally, so their retrieval ability and speed is impaired. I've also been told that people read Chinese much faster than we read English. That would indicate that we have the latent ability to quickly decode much more complicated symbols than the two or three dozen in a phonetic writing system, and we're letting it go to waste.
You shouldn't judge by what you hear on the media, Fraggle. Most media Brits speak much faster than regular Brits. But there again, I may be judging ALL New Yorkers by their media representatives too. BTW, I have heard that French Canadians speak at a helluva lick. (Montreal > NY) I love the pace US Southerners speak at. I used to live just a couple of hundred yards from the British Museum, and I used to hear American accents every day. I remember especially one stunning blonde from somewhere down south asking me the way to the Musuem. She spoke so slow, so leisurely, by the end of the question I almost felt I'd got to know her. I thought, hey gorgeous, do you live your whole life at that pace? How wonderful! How gentle! What luxury of time! I have no friends who speak fast. The slower folk go, the more I tend to like and value them.
