What is the world's happiest language? A new study has the answer
What are the world's happiest languages? A new study looked at the words mainly used in ten languages to determine which is the most positive.
The University of Vermont conducted a "big data" study of billions of words across a number of languages and concluded that: "probably all human language skews toward the use of happy words."
The team identified 10,000 most frequently used words in each of 10 languages including English, Spanish, French, German, Brazilian Portuguese, Korean, Chinese (simplified), Russian, Indonesian and Arabic.
They found that each language, on the whole, uses positive words more frequently and in a wider range of forms than they do negative words. There were gradations of relative linguistic happiness, of course: Spanish, followed by Brazilian Portuguese, English and Indonesian, topped the list for happy language; Chinese appeared least happy, with Korean, Russian and Arabic -- in that order -- showing low but increasing levels of linguistic happiness.
Peter Dodds, University of Vermont mathematician and co-lead of the study, said: "In every source we looked at, people use more positive words than negative ones."
Researchers admit that they having only touched the surface of the emotional trajectory of language, but are confident their research has set up useful parameters for future studies -- studies involving less common languages and the analysis of phrases instead just individual words.
This matter was first looked into back in 1969, when two psychologists from the University of Illinois came up with a hypothesis they called the Pollyanna Hypothesis, according to which there is a universal and natural human tendency regarding the use of positive words much more often than negative ones.
"The study's findings are based on 5 million individual human scores and pave the way for the development of powerful language-based tools for measuring emotion," the study's authors wrote in the abstract of their new paper, published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
