A fast spoken language is one which is generally spoken very quickly by the fluent native speaker. This tends to be the case when there are few distinct vowel sounds, particularly when the vowels are pure (not yielding to diphthongs), leading to a higher number of syllables per word.

The languages which are most frequently heard to be spoken as several syllables per second are: Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Greek, Sardinian, Macedonian, Bulgarian, Serbo-Croat, Romanian, Swedish and outside of Europe, some of the eastern languages, namely Pashto and Urdu. India's first national language and joint official language with English, Hindi, is probably the most consistently spoken fast language.

Reasons

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Consider Italian as an example. Italy's literary language is based on Florence, to linguists the language may be known as Tuscan or even Florentine so as not to discriminate Italians not speaking the standard form (ie. Sicilians, Ligurians, Piedmontese etc). The Standard Italian language has the five basic written vowels, of a, e, i, o and u. On occasion, the e may be modified to è ('open' version) to alter the back of the tongue position in order to produce the correct sound (it is not classed as a separate letter in the Standard Italian alphabet in quite the way that LL and Ñ used to have separate entries in Spanish dictionaries). These vowels are pure vowels, and as such, they carry the sound of one consonant to another somewhat quickly.

To taken an example, if we compare the English English pronunciation of Rabbit, with Taipei, one need only imagine a language of whose vocabulary is entirely spoken in the rabbit format. It is said that these languages are designed such that the sounds move easily in the mouth as opposed to German and French which are often dismissed as being harsh languages with complex sound combinations.

Another feature of Standard Italian, again separating it from non-standard Italian registers is that most true Italian words will end in a vowel (ie. English Milan is rather based on the city's local name as pronounced in Piedmont rather than Tuscany's standard Milano and the same of Turin and Torino); this in turn prevents unpleasant transfers of sound between difficult consonants.

Linguistics