Is English actually the language with the most redundancy?
I don't know about "the most", but apparently so; I was rather surprised when I first heard that as well. That said, I can sort of see where it's coming from, given that just about any word or phrase in English (that isn't a conjunction or something) will have multiple synonyms or alternate and equivalent forms of expressing the same sentiment with slightly different implications.
That's true for downright every natural language there is. Is overestimating the complexity of their language some sort of national pastime among English-speaking individuals? Because it seems to be a very widespread phenomenon (chiefly among monolinguals, to my great amusement).
Eh, I've heard it repeated from a lot of ESL students I've worked with, and it matches my own experiences with Spanish. Which is, y'know, why I added that clause suggesting that it wasn't necessarily "the most" redundant.
That said, I can see some argument for it in no small part because English isn't a national or regional language--it's a de jure or de facto official language in ~60-70 countries and a double handful of territories beyond that, and is spoken fairly widely outside those compared to most languages. It's got a mongrel base drawing on three different language groups and is now a highly international language--both of these result in the accumulation of phrases and slang which mean similar things in different places.
I do like, though, the assumption on your part that redundancy is flatly good. It's nice for writers and annoying in just about every other situation. Who needs to describe the state of a person's condition as "okay" using any of... acceptable, adequate, agreeable, all right, amiable, average, common, cool, copacetic, decent, fair, good, good enough, half-decent, hunky-dory, moderately acceptable, okay, passable, peachy keen, reasonable, respectable, satisfactory, so-so, standard, sufficient, tolerable, unobjectionable, or unexceptional?
Writers, and damned near nobody else. And that's just off the top of my head.
I mean granted,
I think it's nice because you can pay more attention to the flow and sound of your composition as well as accounting for finer shades of meaning, but I'm a (hack) writer.