“Languages vary a lot in terms of the information that they pack into a syllable and also in the rate that they are spoken at. But the interesting thing is that the two kind of balance each other, so that more information dense languages are spoken slower, and those that are less informationally heavy are spoken faster. This means that there is a steady information rate that is very similar among languages,” says study co-author Dan Dediu, a researcher at Lyon’s Laboratoire Dynamique du Langage.