An old and provocative claim in musicology is that a culture’s instrumental music reflects the prosody of its native language. Although this claim dates back at least 50 years, it has been slow in finding empirical support. The reasons for this have been both conceptual and methodological. Until recently, the ways in which linguists thought about speech, rhythm and melody did not facilitate quantitative comparisons with music. This state of affairs is now changing. New ideas and tools from linguistics and cognitive science have opened the way to quantitative comparisons of music and language. This talk illustrates how these methods have been used to address the claim mentioned above; namely that instrumental music reflects the prosody of language. A comparison of British English and French speech and music provides empirical support for this claim, and suggests that implicit learning of linguistic temporal and pitch patterns influences the creation and perception of music.