British English-Speaking Speed 2020

Abstract

It has been 30 decades since Tauroza & Allison measured the speed of British English in 1990 (Tauroza & Allisond, 1990). Has the speed of English speaking changed in this era of great development of thoughts and information explosion? Does the standard rate of oral English in EFL need to be adjusted accordingly? This paper analyses 200 speakers’ 79 corpus with a total duration of 77 hours and 58 minutes in four categories of news monologues, interviews, conversations, and academic lectures in the UK from 2020 to February, 2021, and calculates the speech rate of contemporary British English. It is found that the average speaking speed of British English has reached 198 words per minute (17% faster by 28 words) and 265 syllables per minute (10% faster by 25 syllables). Accordingly, the standard speech rate of EFL teaching should be improved.