Last week I had a very enjoyable telephone conversation with a friend in the States. I was very happy that my non-rhotic accent provided much merriment to my conversational partner, but what surprissed me was the extent to which my vocal cords were left discomforted by the effort of slowing down my natural speaking velocity. The phone call lasted around half an hour, and my vocal vords were left feeling slightly strained and uncomfortable for about as long afterward. After recovering from the suprisingly ruthless lack of sympathy for my affliction evinced by my friend, it got me thinking. Does anybody have any data on comparative speaking speeds among countries where English is the first language?As I told my friend, ANZACs on both sides of the Tasman talk very quickly, and with mouths almost shut, but it would be interesting to see hard data, or even just one hard hard datum, on this. From my own experience, conversing with Nth Americans, has always been difficult, both because I have to slow down so much, and because they seem to take a week to say "how are you?" If anybody knows of a word-per--minute comparison site, I would love to know about it. Cheers