WHY SPANISH NATIVE SPEAKERS SPEAK TOO FAST?

Most beginners who listen to Spanish-speaking videos on youtube (including me) or other social media outlets will notice that Spanish native speakers could speak it at a frightening speed. According the TIME magazine, researchers at the Université de Lyon found that Spanish speakers spoke "at a syllable-per-second velocity of 7.82.", where as Mandarin was "at 5.18 syllables per second." The research introduced the concept of meaning being packed into syllables. Unfortunately, I have not been able to track down the paper that the TIME magazine cited, but it gives us, in general, an explanation of why Spanish speakers speak so fast.

In this blog post, I am going to focus on one aspect that sets Spanish apart from languages like English and French. That is "liaison".

We link words together both in English and French, but the pattern is quite like this:

This is my pen, those are your books. (English)

Les amis sont déjà partis. (French)

If you are an experienced language learner, you will notice that the pattern of liaison found in French and English very often starts with linking the last consonant of a word with the beginning vowel of the next word. 

What is the effect then? You can still distinguish between words even though technically, they are linked together, and that may throw off a beginner.

In Spanish, however, you encounter a pattern where the vowels of the first word are linked to the vowels of the next words, forming technically diphthongs. To illustrate this point, I am going to analyze the first passage of the song "Una Parabla" of Carlos Varela.

Una palabra no dice nada

Una palabra no dice nada

Y al [Yal] mismo tiempo lo esconde todo

Igual que el [quel] viento que e[ques]sconde el[del] agua

Como las flores que e[ques]sconden lodo

Una mirada no dice nada

Y al [Yal]  mismo tiempo lo dice todo

Como la lluvia sobre tu cara

O el [Oel] viejo mapa de al[de-al]gún tesoro

Una verdad no dice nada

Y al Yal] mismo tiempo lo e[loe]sconde todo

Como una [Coməʊna] ho[ao]guera que no se a[sea]paga

Como una [Coməʊna] piedra que nace polvo

Si un día me faltas no seré nada

Y al mismo tiempo lo seré todo

Porque e[quen]n tus ojos están mis alas

Y está la o[lao]rilla donde me a[mea]hogo

Porque e[quen]n tus ojos están mis alas

Y está la o[lao]rilla donde me a[mea]hogo

The colored words are where the liaison occurs. The transliterations in the square brackets indicate the sound when the liaison takes place.

If you listen carefully to this song, those vowels that are colored in red are linked together, forming almost like diphthongs. The effect of this is that it is quite hard to distinguish separate words from each other. It also allows native speakers to speak much faster while appearing to "slur" words.

It is certain by now that Spanish possesses a very large number of words that end in vowels such as "o", "a", "e", in the order of frequency perceived by me. A closer research would point out that many conjunctions, widely-used prepositions, articles in Spanish would start or contain only one vowel, for example the conjunction "y" (and), prepositions "a", "en", articles "el", "otro", "uno",... It would also be interesting to obtain statistics on Spanish words that have the first letter as a vowel. My guess is the percentage will be higher than in English.