I am intrigued by the question of the degree to which the nature and structure of a language might have some predictive capacity in terms of long term survivability and productivity. Are some languages more efficient or effective than others? Do some languages have a greater orientation towards futurity or individualism or positivity, etc. than others? Whether a language does indeed have some predisposition or not, does that predisposition affect life outcomes? Or are all languages the same in their function and outcomes?
This study does not answer these questions because it is not a comparison between languages, but it does analyze whether language can have an embedded characteristic such as positiveness. A baby step towards the more fundamental questions but a step none-the-less.
In sum, our findings for these diverse English language corpora suggest that a positivity bias is universal, that the emotional spectrum of language is very close to self-similar with respect to frequency, and that in our stories and writings we tend toward prosocial communication. Our work calls for similar studies of other languages and dialects, examinations of corpora factoring in popularity (e.g., of books or articles), as well as investigations of other more specific emotional dimensions. Related work would explore changes in positivity bias over time, and correlations with quantifiable aspects of societal organization and function such as wealth, cultural norms, and political structures. Analyses of the emotional content of phrases and sentences in large-scale texts would also be a natural next, more complicated stage of research. Promisingly, we have shown elsewhere for Twitter that the average happiness of individual words correlates well with that of surrounding words in status updates
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