Oh, what a lovely language!

Having been a writer and journalist for more than 30 years, I never fail to be seduced and intrigued by language. We use words to construct meaning and context for our lives, therefore the language we use is extremely important. So I was fascinated to find out about a recent study that shows English is an overwhelmingly positive language.

It started with a mathemetician at the University of Vermont proclaiming that average global happiness has been dropping for the past two years, based on his analysis of billions of tweets.

This could simply be saying something about people who use Twitter, so to verify his findings, statisticians went on to analyse billions of words from Twitter, a half-century of music lyrics, 20 years of The New York Times and millions of books going back to 1520.

After defining the 10,000-odd most frequently used English words from these four sources, they asked a group of volunteers to rate the emotional temperature of these words. A positive word such as laughter was given a score of 8.5 while terrrorist rated 1.3.

The result of all this number-crunching showed that English is a language strongly biased towards the positive, with an overwhelming preponderance of happier words among the top 5,000 words in each of the sources.

So it seems that positive words may have been more deeply embedded in our communication than negative ones, which backs up other research pointing to the fact that we are an inherently pro-social, storytelling species – ie we have evolved to speak and behave in ways that support or benefit others.

Handily, the researchers produced a list of the top 50 most positive words in the English language.

Narrowly pushing happiness and love into second and third places, the most positive word is… laughter! Joy is at number 10, rainbow at 13, celebration at 20, comedy at 28, Christmas at 32, beach at 40, friends at 46 and sweetest at 50.

With all these wonderful, life-affirming words at our disposal, then you could argue that it is our responsibility to use sentences, paragraphs and therefore thoughts which allow us to construct a healthy narrative. Or at the very least, enjoy the laughter!