Readability of Newspapers in 11 Languages
C. H. Bjornsson · Reading Research Quarterly · 1983
EARLY IN THE 1960s, the author constructed a readability formula on the following simple lines: Sentence length + word length = lix. Sentence length is the number of words per sentence. Word length here means the percentage of words with more than six letters, and lix is merely an abbreviation of the Swedish word for readability index. The formula has since been tested on many thousand books and texts, and complete investigations have been carried out in Danish, English, French, German, and Finnish. In order to check the results of these studies, we have tested 250 newspapers in 11 languages. The abovementioned formula yielded the following figures for normal newspapers: Swedish 17 + 30 = 47, Norwegian 20 + 28 = 48, Danish 22 + 29 -= 51, English 25 + 27 = 52, French 23 + 32 = 55, German 22 + 37 = 59, Italian 30 + 35 = 65, Spanish 35 + 32 = 67, Portuguese 36 + 34 = 70, Finnish 14 + 58 = 72, and Russian 18 + 47 = 65. The standard deviation for these figures varies around .6. The differences are largely dependent on the languages themselves, but writers and journalistic tradition are also of importance.