Happy thoughts

Human language reveals a universal positivity bias

Spanish is the happiest language; Chinese, not so much

The National Academy of Sciences has published a study to determine which languages are the happiest, or more precisely, have the highest positivity bias. Why this information is important eludes me, but it is mildly interesting.

Spanish was the most positively biased language overall, while Chinese had the smallest “positivity bias” of all the languages, at least for digitized books in Chinese. Clearly, our Pollyanna brains have shaped our languages.

The study may not be inherently flawed, but asking the question of “positivity bias” seems to miss the mark in my opinion. Of course human language is bias toward “positive” declarations as the majority of lexica is a statement or assertion based on affirmative observation and thought, not the negation thereof. That is to say, no language is based on statements consisting of what *is not* happening…However, as Laurence Horn puts it: “Negation is at the core of human language; without negation there can be no denial, contradiction, irony, or lies.”

Just think to yourself how many times you’ve started a conversation by saying “It is *NOT* raining” as opposed to “It *IS* sunny/cloudy/nice/beautiful”. Without delving into the existential psychology of how cognition effects language, one can easily discern that ‘positive’ words will obviously be more prevalent than ‘negative’ morphemes.

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