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May 22, 2013, 5:54pm

Any Port in a Storm :: On the Plaza :: Where Words Collide :: Is English an optimistic language?

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Topic: Is English an optimistic language? (Read 296 times)

kerouac2
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Is English an optimistic language?
« Thread Started on Jan 21, 2012, 11:52am »

There was a quite interesting article in Le Monde this week about a study made by researchers of the University of Vermont to check the frequency of positive and negative words in the English language. The purpose was to try to determine if the language is neutral or if there is a natural tendency to optimism or pessimism built into it.

They decided to check four completely different sources of text for comparison. Thank god for computers because:

The lyrics of 300,000 songs written between 1960 and 2007 were examined. That’s 59 million words.

They also checked 1.8 million articles from the New York Times published between 1987 and 2007. That’s one billion words.

821 million tweets lifted from Twitter were examined. They dated from 2008 to 2010 and contained 9 billion words.

Lastly, they checked 3.3 million books uploaded by Google Books covering the period from 1520 to 2008 for a grand finale of 361 billion words.

The 5000 most common words were extracted from each group and this gave an end result of 10,022 words from all sources.

The next step was to evaluate all of the words and rate them from 1 to 9. 1 was for negative words and 9 was for the happiest words. 5 was for a completely neutral word. Examples of the extremes were “terrorist” (1.3) and “laughter” (8.5).

Each word was evaluated by 50 different people, meaning that more than 500,000 grades were given. So, who gave the grades? They hired “Amazon Mechanical Turk” to do this. I had never heard of it. These are cheap laborers who do boring internet jobs that machines either can’t do or don’t do well enough. For example, there are the people who blur the faces on Google Earth or identify the celebrities in photos of crowd scenes. Not initially trusting the quality of such low paid workers, the researchers compared the evaluations with a study that had been done on a thousand words by university students in 1999. They discovered that the ratings corresponded perfectly.

And so what did they find in the end? They were expecting the NYT to be the most depressing, full of conflicts, crises, scandals and catastrophes. They thought that the song lyrics would be the most joyous. Well, they were wrong.

As turned out, all four sources were just brimming with optimism and goodness. Google Books came out on top at 78.8%, followed by the New York Times at 78.38%. The song lyrics came out lowest at 64.14% -- possibly pulled down, jokes Le Monde, by the lyrics of Eleanor Rigby (Eleanor Rigby died in the church and was buried along with her name. Nobody came. Father MacKenzie, wiping the dirt from his hands as he walks from the grave. No one was saved.).

The researchers concluded that the positive bias of English is probably designed to assist in communication and even puts a positive spin on bad news. This helps to keep civilization on the right track.

However, the big question is whether this is true for all languages, and also if there can be significant variations due to the era, the health of the population, cultural tastes or political structure.

Since English is so far the only language for which this study was done, we’ll have to wait to see if the destruction of the Tower of Babel has given us irreconcilable differences.

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bjd
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Re: Is English an optimistic language?
« Reply #1 on Jan 21, 2012, 2:02pm »

I wonder too if there would have been a difference between UK English and US English words. I think the US tends to like to put a positive spin on things.

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