The smiles we speak

Maria Isabel Garcia

This is AI generated summarization, which may have errors. For context, always refer to the full article.

The smiles we speak
[Science Solitaire] Human language is generally a happy one, a recent study finds out

One of my ultimate wishes is to have my favorite people in the world in one room doing what it is they do best. In a portion of that time, I want them grouped according to what they are most passionate about. One of those groups would have to be writers and lyricists – logomaniacs. Imagine what insights they would yield about the world of words!

But until then, if I ever even get to have that kind of luck, I will read and scavenge in the bins of science.  And lately, I found out that that human language is generally a happy one. It means that if an alien ever gets to ask you about what you can say about human language, you can say that human words universally sport a “smile.”

A study, recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, painstakingly studied about 100,000 words across 10 languages in 24 “bodies of words” (they termed this “corpora”) such as websites, music lyrics, movie and TV titles, and even tweets. They concluded that across languages, most words that people use, elicit happy feelings from their speakers. Thus, we can now confirm that the words we fashion to tell and receive the story of each other’s lives and times are universally positive.

This was not an easy study. Each of those 100,000 words were ranked by their native speakers according to how they felt in response to each word’s negativity or positivity. This meant the study had to collate 5 million individual responses. The questionnaire included 9 emoticons ranging from a full frown to a full smile. The finding was that across all corpora, words elicited “positivity”, with Spanish ranking highest in positivity and Chinese the least positive (but it was still positive).

They only studied 10 languages so far but it was the largest study on the emotional content of human language. Previous studies relied on words that were chosen by experts rather than generated by actual big data now available to us in this digital milieu.

While the researchers concluded that human language is mostly positive, they also said it is not meant to diminish the “negative” emotions elicited by certain words.

The study aptly placed “words” in our cultural landscape when they wrote that “words are the atoms of language” and I think language is the currency of our emotions. The words we say, write, sing are the ebbs and flows in the sea of our lives, individual and shared.  There was an urban legend that was going around that Billy Holiday’s song “Gloomy Sunday” was banned because it caused suicides. While these have never been verified, the fact that this went around and was accepted to a degree that it became an urban legend tells us so much about the power we perceive in words.

It would be interesting to study further how the positivity of a language is related to how specific populations would rate their own happiness. Does language that is generally happy come from cultures that are more social than others?

I think the next thing as the authors noted is to go study particular groups, maybe by generation or by careers, and the emotional landscape of their respective lexicon. I also am curious about gay lingo. I have no firm data to back this up but my hunch is gay lingo is one happy language.

The oldest written “words” that have been found so far, were etched on a stone in Syria. It is about 6,000 years old. It does not say anything particularly happy. It says “here are ten goats”.  If an alien ever gets to get the big picture of human language as the study did, that being will probably say, with confusion or admiration, or both: “here’s one happy planet.” – Rappler.com

Add a comment

Sort by

There are no comments yet. Add your comment to start the conversation.

Summarize this article with AI

How does this make you feel?

Loading
Download the Rappler App!