Reading Speed in Different Languages: Does Your Native Language Make You Faster or Slower?

Written and Reviewed by the Cognitive Train Team

If you've ever read in more than one language, you've probably noticed that some feel faster than others. It turns out that's not just an impression — controlled research confirms that average reading speeds vary meaningfully across languages. Languages with short average word lengths tend to produce higher WPM scores than languages where words pack in more meaning per unit. But the reason that gap exists is more interesting than it first appears, and understanding it changes how you interpret WPM scores across languages entirely.

The IReST Data: Oral Reading Speed Across 17 Languages

The most systematic cross-linguistic reading speed data comes from the International Reading Speed Texts (IReST), a set of standardised paragraphs translated into 17 languages and validated by native-speaker linguists. Published in Investigative Ophthalmology and Visual Science, the IReST study measured oral reading speed — participants read passages aloud — across languages including English, Spanish, Italian, Finnish, French, Dutch, Arabic, Chinese, and Japanese.

Participants read passages aloud, so all figures here reflect oral reading speed — a distinct context from silent reading, and lower than silent reading rates generally. Across all 17 languages, the overall average was 184 WPM (±29) and 863 characters per minute (±234), with the large standard deviation reflecting genuine cross-language variation as well as individual differences. Per-language averages varied substantially — English and Spanish toward the higher end, Finnish and Arabic toward the lower end — but the primary paper reports cross-language averages rather than a definitive per-language ranking, and the wide variability within each language means precise national averages should be treated with caution.

What the data establishes clearly is that raw WPM figures vary meaningfully across languages, and that much of this variation is not a reliable guide to underlying reading ability once word length differences are accounted for.

Why WPM Is a Misleading Cross-Language Metric

The critical issue is that languages pack very different amounts of information into each word. Finnish and Italian are both well-studied examples of this. Finnish is an agglutinative language — it combines multiple meanings into single long words that would require several words in English to express. When you count WPM, the Finnish reader processes that word once; the English reader processes multiple separate words. The Finnish reader isn't slower — the metric is simply less favourable to long-word languages.

The Brysbaert (2019) meta-analysis published in the Journal of Memory and Language explicitly notes that reading rates in other languages can be predicted reasonably well by accounting for how many words those languages require to convey the same message as English — with longer-word languages appearing slower in WPM terms while processing comparable information per unit time. The IReST cross-language average of 863 characters per minute (with wide variability) illustrates the same principle: when measured in characters rather than words, the gaps between most alphabetic languages narrow considerably, though the large standard deviation in the data means no precise clustering figure holds across all languages.

Orthographic Depth: The Factor That Genuinely Does Affect Speed

Word length explains the WPM gap between languages like Finnish and English — but there's a separate factor that genuinely affects how fast readers can process their native language: orthographic depth, or how consistently letters map to sounds.

A "shallow" orthography has a direct and consistent relationship between spelling and pronunciation. Finnish and Italian are the classic examples — in both languages, the same letter reliably represents the same sound. Once you know the rules, you can decode any word correctly on the first attempt. English, by contrast, is a notoriously "deep" orthography — the same letter combination can be pronounced multiple ways (think "ough" in through, though, thought, rough), and many words must be memorised individually rather than decoded by rule.

Research published in PMC on Italian-English bilingualism found that monolingual readers of consistent orthographies like Italian and German tend to acquire reading fluency faster than monolingual English readers, and that reading in irregular orthographies engages additional neural resources associated with handling orthographic inconsistency. The extra cognitive work of a deep orthography like English is reflected in both acquisition speed and neural processing patterns — not a fundamental cap on adult reading ability, but a higher initial barrier to fluency.

This has real-world implications. Children learning to read in Italian or Finnish typically achieve decoding fluency faster than English-learning children of equivalent intelligence and instruction quality. Dyslexia symptoms also tend to be less severe in consistent orthographies — not because the underlying neurological difference is smaller, but because the language system makes fewer demands on the processes that dyslexic readers find difficult.

What This Means for English Readers

English's orthographic complexity creates a higher initial learning burden, but it doesn't necessarily cap adult reading speed lower than other languages. Once English readers have internalised the irregular patterns through extensive reading — which happens through sheer volume of exposure rather than explicit rule-learning — they process familiar words as automatically as readers of simpler orthographies process theirs.

The practical implication is that vocabulary breadth and reading volume matter even more for English readers than for readers of consistent orthographies. Because so many English words require whole-word memorisation rather than phonological decoding, the more words you've seen before, the less cognitive work each word requires. This is one of the reasons subvocalization — the inner voice habit that slows most adult readers — is particularly persistent in English: the language's irregularity means readers relied on phonological processing for longer during acquisition, and that habit is harder to break.

Reading in a Second Language

If you read regularly in a second language, your speed in that language will typically be considerably lower than in your native language, even at high proficiency levels — the Brysbaert meta-analysis explicitly notes that reading rates are lower for readers with English as a second language, without specifying a precise percentage gap. The difference narrows with exposure but rarely closes entirely at non-native proficiency levels. Part of the gap is vocabulary depth — knowing a word in your native language involves a richer network of associations that makes recognition faster. Part is the orthographic difference: if your first language had a consistent orthography and your second is English, you're learning a more complex mapping system, which adds processing overhead even for fluent readers.

Research on Italian-English bilinguals published in PMC found that group differences in reading speed were larger with Italian stimuli than English stimuli — meaning that the advantage of being a native Italian reader is more pronounced for Italian text than the advantage of being a native English reader is for English text. The consistency of Italian orthography creates a more uniform processing profile; English's inconsistency creates more individual variation, which means some English readers are significantly faster than others in ways that don't map cleanly onto Italian reading proficiency.

The Characters-Per-Minute Picture

When you step back from WPM and look at characters per minute — which better reflects the actual visual processing workload — the dramatic differences between languages narrow. The IReST study found an overall average of 863 characters per minute across 17 languages, with wide variability. The pattern suggests that the time spent per unit of visual information is more consistent across languages than the WPM figures imply — the apparent gap between higher-WPM and lower-WPM languages reflects word-length differences more than any fundamental difference in processing speed.

For non-alphabetic writing systems — Chinese and Japanese kanji — the comparison is different again. Logographic characters carry more information per unit than alphabetic words, and reading strategies differ substantially from alphabetic reading. Direct WPM comparisons between logographic and alphabetic languages are largely meaningless without accounting for information density per character.

What This Means for Your WPM Score

If you've taken a reading speed test in English and want to understand what your score means, the most relevant benchmarks are English-language ones — the Brysbaert meta-analysis average of 238 WPM for non-fiction, and the 175–300 WPM range that covers most adult readers. Your score in another language will likely differ, and that difference mostly reflects the structural properties of the languages rather than your underlying reading ability.

The factors that genuinely limit reading speed in any language — habitual regression, subvocalization, narrow visual span — are largely language-independent. Training with tools like RSVP reading and the Schulte Table builds faster word recognition that transfers across reading contexts. For a broader look at what the research says about realistic speed improvement, does speed reading work covers the evidence honestly. And if you want to know where your English score places you specifically, the article on what is a good reading speed puts the WPM ranges in full context.

Test Your Reading Speed

The test below measures your reading speed on a standard English prose passage with comprehension questions. Your result is directly comparable to the adult benchmarks discussed above — 238 WPM average, 175–300 WPM for most adults. For a fuller picture of where you stand across dimensions, the reading speed by age benchmarks show how your score compares to your age group specifically.