Language is universal, but it has few indisputably universal characteristics, with cross-linguistic variation being the norm. For example, languages differ greatly in the number of syllables they allow, resulting in large variation in the Shannon information per syllable. Nevertheless, all natural languages allow their speakers to efficiently encode and transmit information. We show here, using quantitative methods on a large cross-linguistic corpus of 17 languages, that the coupling between language-level (information per syllable) and speaker-level (speech rate) properties results in languages encoding similar information rates (~39 bits/s) despite wide differences in each property individually: Languages are more similar in information rates than in Shannon information or speech rate. These findings highlight the intimate feedback loops between languages’ structural properties and their speakers’ neurocognition and biology under communicative pressures. Thus, language is the product of a multiscale communicative niche construction process at the intersection of biology, environment, and culture.
We thank D. E. Blasi for suggestions and feedback on the statistical analysis and on previous versions of this paper. We also thank E. Castelli for help with collecting the Vietnamese data. Funding: D.D. was funded by a European Institutes for Advanced Study (EURIAS) Fellowship 2017\\u20132018 and by an IDEXLYON (16-IDEX-0005) Fellowship grant (2018\\u20132021). C.C., Y.M.O., and F.P. were funded by LABEX ASLAN (ANR-10LABX-0081) of Universit\\u00E9 de Lyon within the French program Investissements d\\u2019Avenir program (ANR-11-IDEX-0007) operated by the National Research Agency (ANR).
