tüdig

Tüdig is a fictional term used in speculative linguistics to describe a hypothetical measure of linguistic density or perceptual load in spoken or written material. In this imagined framework, tüdig aims to quantify how much information a listener or reader is required to process per unit of time, considering tempo, phonetic variety, syntactic complexity, and lexical diversity. The concept appears in online discussions and in constructed-language exercises as a thought experiment rather than an established metric.

The term was reportedly coined in a 2010s online forum by a user who explored how different languages or passages require different cognitive effort, even when average word length is similar. The word itself is not tied to any single real language and has no standardized definition in scholarly literature; it serves as a pointer for comparing perceived information load.

In practice, a tüdig score would be imagined as a composite of several submetrics: phonetic density (variety of sounds and prosodic changes per second), syntactic density (average clauses per second and depth of embedding), and semantic density (rate of new or unique information). In fictional or educational contexts, passages with higher tüdig are described as more demanding to process.

Criticism centers on its lack of empirical validation and the risk of conflating cognitive load with other factors. As such, tüdig remains a playful or pedagogical construct rather than a formal concept in linguistics.

See also: information density, cognitive load, linguistic complexity.