All languages skew towards happiness
WASHINGTON
PTI
|
All human languages be it English, Arabic, Russian or Korean tend to use positive words more frequently than negative ones, a new study has found. “Put even more simply, humans tend to look on (and talk about) the bright side of life,“ researchers said.
A team of scientists at the University of Vermont (UVM) and colleagues used a massive data set of many billions of words, based on actual usage.
The study indicates that lan guage itself has a positive outlook.And, therefore, “it seems that positive social interaction is built into its fundamental structure,“ said mathematician Peter Dodds who co-led the study.
A Google Web crawl of Spanishlanguage sites had the highest average word happiness, and a search of Chinese books had the lowest, but all 24 sources of words that they analysed skewed above the neutral score of five on their one-to-nine scale regardless of the language.
The study indicates that lan guage itself has a positive outlook.And, therefore, “it seems that positive social interaction is built into its fundamental structure,“ said mathematician Peter Dodds who co-led the study.
A Google Web crawl of Spanishlanguage sites had the highest average word happiness, and a search of Chinese books had the lowest, but all 24 sources of words that they analysed skewed above the neutral score of five on their one-to-nine scale regardless of the language.
