Spanish is the Most Positive Language, But Others Aren't Far Behind

Do we use positive words more frequently than negative ones in human language? Scientists have taken a look at the world's languages and have discovered which languages are the most positive and whether, as a whole, we're more likely to look on the bright side.

The idea that there is a universal human tendency to use positive words more frequently than negative ones is known as the Pollyanna Hypothesis. Until now, though, scientists haven't confirmed this particular guess.

In order to see whether or not the Pollyanna Hypothesis held true, the researchers examined 10 different languages, including English, Spanish, French, German, Brazilian Portuguese, Korean, Chinese, Russian, Indonesian and Arabic. They gathered billions of words from around the world using 24 types of sources including books, news outlets, social media, websites, television and move subtitles, and song lyrics. From these sources, the researchers then identified ten thousand of the most frequently used words in each language.

The researchers then paid native speakers to rate the frequently-used words on a nine-point scale from a deeply frowning face to a broadly smiling one. From these native speakers, they gathered five million individual human scores on the words.

So what did they find? It turns out that the Spanish language had the highest average word happiest, while Chinese had the lowest. What's more interesting, though, is that in all cases, there was a bias toward positivity. On average, humanity used more happy than sad words.

The findings reveal a bit more about human language. That said, the new study doesn't assert that all natural texts will skew positive. What it does show, though, is that our social nature appears to be encoded in the building blocks of language.

The findings are published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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