Google has studied the evolution of language for two hundred years

Scientists have adapted the Google search service for large-scale linguistic studies. With the help of experts, using the 5 million books scanned were able to trace the evolution of language in the last 200 years. Article published in the specialist journal Science, and briefly wrote about the work of New Scientist.

Until now, linguists have not been a tool with which to analyze a large number of texts. New research to work with books which were translated into digital format so far - only there are about 15 million. Scientists have selected one third of the texts (5,2 million books written in English, French, Spanish, German, Chinese and Russian) and formed the basis of all the words used in them - they got about 500 billion. Base words Ngrams can be found here - search for words is carried out on the basis of the algorithms Google.

After analyzing the findings, the authors were able to make a wide variety of conclusions. In particular, they found that over the past hundred years, the number of frequently used words doubled - if in 1900 we used about 544 thousand words, then in 2000 this figure had risen to one million, with 52 percent of new words has been actively used after 1950 - ies.

In addition, experts have studied the impact on the use of certain words censorship. Scientists have found that after 1989 the words “Tiananmen Square” virtually ceased to appear in the literature published in China. The same thing happened with the name of Leon Trotsky in the USSR in 1940 and with the names of Hollywood actors implicated in relations with the Soviet Union in the U.S..

17 December 2010

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