Dutch talk faster than Flemish

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A Flemish study which showed that the Dutch talk faster than their Southern neighbours was shot down rapidly by Dutch experts when it was first published in 2004. But four years later linguist Hugo Quené from the University of Utrecht has proved his Flemish colleagues right. Quené used new methods to pick apart the 38-hour speech corpus and used a recently developed statistical method, multi-level analysis. As it turns out long “phrases” (bits of speech separated by pauses) take relatively less time to pronounce than short ones. Even so, the Dutch tend to use shorter phrases than the Flemish. Also when phrases of the same length were compared, the Dutch proved to be the fast talkers.

Via Blik op Nieuws (Dutch).

1 Comment »

  1. Mrs. A says:

    Want to hear fast Dutch talkers? Watch RTL Boulevard on RTL4, weekdays at 18.30.

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