Human Languages with Greater Information Density Increase Communication Speed, but Decrease Conversation Breadth
This research addresses how language structure influences communication patterns, with implications for societal behavior, but it is incremental as it builds on existing linguistic variation studies.
The study analyzed about 1,000 languages to show that higher information density in languages leads to faster communication but narrower conversation topics, with denser languages associated with more compact semantic configurations.
Human languages vary widely in how they encode information within circumscribed semantic domains (e.g., time, space, color, human body parts and activities), but little is known about the global structure of semantic information and nothing about its relation to human communication. We first show that across a sample of ~1,000 languages, there is broad variation in how densely languages encode information into their words. Second, we show that this language information density is associated with a denser configuration of semantic information. Finally, we trace the relationship between language information density and patterns of communication, showing that informationally denser languages tend toward (1) faster communication, but (2) conceptually narrower conversations within which topics of conversation are discussed at greater depth. These results highlight an important source of variation across the human communicative channel, revealing that the structure of language shapes the nature and texture of human engagement, with consequences for human behavior across levels of society.