alt Hacker NewsWritten English is still pretty good when compared to all languages. When considering UTF-8 bytes, a English is almost as good as Chinese, since Chinese uses about 3 bytes per character.
For spoken language, French and English are at the top, but most languages are about the same bits/second. Languages with less information density are just spoken faster to make up for it.
How fast people speak is more a cultural thing than a language thing. People in Texas, for example, speak more slowly than other speakers of American English.