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n2doc

(47,953 posts)
Tue Dec 13, 2011, 11:13 AM Dec 2011

Happiness and the English Language



By Brandon Keim December 13, 2011 | 6:30 am


The words in four massive text databases — 361 billion words in 3.29 million books on Google Books, 9 billion words in 821 million tweets issued between 2008 and 2010, 1 billion words in 1.8 million New York Times articles published from 1987 to 2007, and 58.6 million words from the lyrics of 295,000 popular songs — were analyzed, collated and distilled into a list of most-used words, then scored on their emotional resonance. The result: English seems to be a happy language, with positive words used more often than negative.

In these graphs, negativity and positivity flow from left to right along the x-axes, and word frequency is measured on the y-axes.

Image: Kloumann et al./arXiv

Citation: “Positivity of the English language.” By Isabel M. Kloumann, Christopher M. Danforth, Kameron Decker Harris, Catherine A. Bliss, Peter Sheridan Dodds. arXiv, August 29, 2011.
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Happiness and the English Language (Original Post) n2doc Dec 2011 OP
Cool but... progressoid Dec 2011 #1
That's all there is on this image n2doc Dec 2011 #2
Here's a link to the original (?) pdf: Jim__ Dec 2011 #3
I wonder if sarcasm was taken into account. (nt) redqueen Dec 2011 #4
I would be interested in comparisons lazarus Dec 2011 #5

lazarus

(27,383 posts)
5. I would be interested in comparisons
Tue Dec 13, 2011, 05:09 PM
Dec 2011

how happy is English compared to Mandarin, or Russian, or Spanish?

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