How Different Languages Allow Laziness

April 2, 2025 - Published

I think most people can agree that language allows for a lot of laziness. In "proper" English, you would say, "I am going to go now," but in real spoken English, it would sound more like, "I'mma go now." That's a reduction of 6 words down to 3! While I'm calling it laziness for the sake of a more interesting title, it would be more accurate to call this "efficiency."

However, something I found interesting was exactly HOW different languages reached this level of efficiency. These are more personal observations rather than something based on studies (I could not find any article on the exact same subject), but I hope others find these observations interesting -- because, in essence, I feel that almost every strange or difficult feature in language is actually the result of increasing efficiency.

In order to create more efficiency in speech, there is just one question to answer: how do you relay more information with less effort? This will often require cutting out syllables in speech, which allows faster speech with less effort. So, how do these languages do that?

#1: Dropping words

Japanese is a pro-drop language, allowing you to drop certain words based on context. This is so prevalent that many learners are discouraged from saying "あなた" ("you") since it can often come off as unnatural or even rude, with the word usually being implied in context.

My favorite example of this is the phrase "元気?" which is a greeting that literally means, "Healthy?" The English equivalent would probably be something like, "You good?" but in English you have to include "you" or else it sounds unnatural. Meanwhile, while I'm pretty sure "あなたは元気ですか?" (lit. Are you healthy?) is grammatically correct, I'm pretty sure nobody says it like this ever.

Since Japanese has strong restrictions on how words are able to be formed (very small phonetic inventory, strict phonotactics, etc.), dropping words is a pretty straightforward way to make sentences go quicker. What about languages that don't have these types of restrictions?

#2: Having more sounds

This point sounds strange, but hear me out. If a hypothetical language only had 3 letters like P, A, T, there would only be so many ways to put those letters together in a one syllable word. Pat, tap, apt, atp, pta, tpa, and half of those are arguably not even pronounceable as one syllable. Meanwhile, having more letters would allow for more combinations, and one syllable is the fastest that a word can be pronounced.

A great example of this would be... English! Relative to a language like Japanese, its phonetic inventory is much larger, and its phonotactics allow letters to be combined in way more ways. Without even factoring in the latter, say all these words out loud and notice how they're all exactly the same barring a unique vowel in the middle: tan, ten, tin, ton, teen, tine, toon, tone. Japanese only has 5 vowel sounds, so it would only be able to make 5 of these, but English has 8! This allows the language to make many more words with a much smaller syllable count.

Before we get to more complicated stuff, let's go over one more way to differentiate words without adding more sounds to the language.

#3: Tones

Mandarin Chinese's difficulty is a bit infamous for multiple things including its tone system, but it's rather elegant when you think about it. Instead of adding something like 4 extra vowel sounds, you can get 4 different pronunciations of a syllable like "ma" by the tone of your pronunciation. In pinyin, these are often represented by diacritic marks which show whether the tone goes up or down: mā (steady/high), má (rising), mǎ (low), mà (high/falling).

While it's very difficult for learners to differentiate the sounds during speech, it's intuitive for Chinese speakers who grew up with it, which makes sense when you realize that tones are in English speech, too. It's the difference between: Huh? Huh! Huh. Huh...

Of course, the difference is that it just adds a different nuance in English, while in Chinese it's the difference between "mother" and "horse."

While not actually tones, I'll mention one more feature that I don't want to dedicate an extra section to, which is stress. In English, "below" and "bellow" are pronounced with the exact same sounds, but one is pronounced more like "be-LOW," and the other "BE-low," which differentiates them.

#4: Encoding information

The last one I have in mind is encoding information, which occurs through inflection. In Spanish, "hablar" means "to talk," but the word can be conjugated where different word endings are encoded with information about the subject and tense. For example, "hablaremos" has to be translated into 3 English words: "We will talk," since it's conjugated for the future tense with "we" as the subject, but is only 1 word in Spanish.

While inflection can be used just for clarifying information, it can often allow words to be dropped since the inflection itself can clarify the information already. In Spanish, you could say, "Yo quiero hablar" to say "I want to talk," but Spanish speakers will usually only say that to put emphasis on the subject, with the more common version being "Quiero hablar."

As language learners, it can be difficult to run into things like conjugation and tones and be like, "Why do I have to learn all this when it all feels so arbitrary and difficult?" However, once you get a handle on it, it can open up doors for communication and understanding. In other words, sometimes you really wish you can just say "puedo" in English.

I saw an auxlanger question the difficulty of language learning as illogical, and I felt it came from the fundamental misunderstanding that speakers of a language trending towards what's "easy" does not mean "easy to learn as an outsider" -- after all, babies acquire their first language at about the same rate regardless of the perceived difficulty of the language (note: I'm like 90% sure this is true based on previous findings but spent over half an hour trying to find a single source and couldn't, someone help??). Instead, the language trends towards what's easiest for people who already speak the language. And I find the effects very interesting!