iStock/Thinktock(BURLINGTON, Vt.) — As much as we complain about everything under the sun, the people of the world may actually be more optimistic than we give ourselves credit for.
At least a University of Vermont study on human languages suggests that.
Lead author Peter Sheridan Dodds and his colleagues collected 10,000 of the most-used words from 10 languages to assess how natives viewed these words either positively or negatively. The words were ranked from one to nine with one being the most negative and nine the most positive.
For instance, “kill” would rate about a one while “love” with be closer to nine.
After all the results were in, Sheridan Dodds discovered that more words than not were seen in a positive light in all 10 languages.
As for which languages leaned more to the positive side, the top two were Mexican-Spanish and Brazilian-Portuguese.
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