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Have you ever wondered why hearing Spanish can bring a smile to your face? Even the angriest telenovela or sharpest comeback can leave you feeling weirdly uplifted. Or why people around the world are happily memorizing Bad Bunny's lyrics? It turns out Spanish might actually be the happiest language.
Researchers at the University of Vermont and the MITRE Corporation ran an experiment in 2015 to measure happiness or sadness from large texts. They pulled 100,000 of the most frequently used words across ten major languages and ended up with evidence that some languages are happier than others.
From English and Spanish to Chinese and Korean, they asked thousands of native speakers to rate how positive or negative each word felt on a scale from 1 to 9, with a sad face to a smiley face. “As all of those languages came back from our surveys, we saw the same pattern. We saw that there were more happy words in all of them,” explained researcher Peter Dodds. Words like "laughter" received universally positive scores, while words like "Church" got mixed results.
Across every language and every source, they found that people use more positive words than negative ones. Psychologists call this tendency the Pollyanna principle. But some languages were more positive than others. "We found that the Spanish ones, rated by people in Mexico, they were all at the top in terms of their median level of happiness," researcher Peter Dodds said. Chinese ranked as the least positively skewed language in the group.
This same data helped build a real-time “hedonometer,” which tracks Twitter to see how happy people sound online. They collected about 50 million messages per day. “That’s about a trillion words in the past five to six years we’ve been doing this … Various versions of ‘hahaha’ end up in the top 5,000 most frequently used words on Twitter. In every language,” Dodds explained.
"The news is full of bad things and there are terrible threads in social media here and there, but if you step back from that and look at language as a whole, [you see the positive trend]," he continued.
The bigger question now is whether speaking a happier language like Spanish can actually make you feel happier. Science hasn’t answered that yet, but if you’re in a funk, maybe start with a Spanish playlist, a dubbed rom-com, or just casually dropping some of your favorite words with a smile on your face.