The Global Language Monitor

The English Language WordClock: 998,773

 

1,227 words until the 1,000,000th Word (April 29?)

 

The Economist Predictions for 2009 Preview:  English Marks a Million

Listen to the segment on Morning Edition

 

Save the Date:  English nears a milestone (Christian Science Monitor)

 

News Forcaster:  When will English pass 1 million words?

Current forecast: after 3/30/08 and before 4/30/08 (45% chance)

 

 

English as The Global Langauge

 

English has become the first truly global language with some 1.35 billion speakers as a first, second or auxiliary language.  Paul JJ Payack examines its impact on the world economy, culture and society in A Million Words and Counting (Citadel Press, New York, 2008).   ”A Must Read for anyone doing business on a global level!” –Brian Klosterman, Silicon Valley Entrepreneur and Inventor

  

The Million Word March in Smithsonian Magazine

 

 

 

 THE WORLD IN WORDS:  Top Words of 2008 

 

 

 

 Obama election tops all news stories since Year 2000

 

 More than double all the other major news events COMBINED

 

 Does a new decade begin January 20^th?

 

L’express: Barack Obama, l’histoire du XXIe siècle pour les médias

Austin, TX December 29, 2008 (MetaNewswire) – The election of Barack Obama to the Presidency of the United States tops all major news stories since the year 2000 according to a analysis released by the Global Language Monitor (www.LanguageMonitor.com).  In fact citations of Barack Obama in the global print and electronic media, on the Internet, and throughout the blogosphere more than double the other main stories of the last decade combined.  These include in descending order:  the Iraq War, the Beijing Olympics, the Financial Tsunami, Hurricane Katrina, the death of Pope John Paul II, the 9/11 Terrorist Attacks and the Asian Tsunami.

 

Rank	Story
1	Obama
2	Iraq War
3	Beijing Olympics
4	Financial Tsunami
5	Hurricane Katrina
6	Pope John Paul II
7	9/11 Terrorist Attacks
8	S. Asian Tsunami

When separating out the global print and electronic media alone, GLM found that more stories have appeared about the election of Barack Obama to the Presidency of the United States than the number of stories about Hurricane Katrina (No. 2), the Financial Tsunami (No. 3), and the Iraq War (No. 4) combined.  Next on the list of top stories since the Year 2000 include The 9/11 Terrorist Attacks (No. 5), the Beijing Olympics (No. 6), the Death of Pope John Paul II (No.7), and the South Asian Tsunami (No.8)  

The stories were measured in the print and electronic media for a one year period after the event. 

 

Rank	Story
1	Obama
2	Hurricane Katrina
3	Financial Tsunami
4	Iraq War
5	9/11 Terrorist Attacks
6	Beijing Olympics
7	Pope John Paul II
8	S. Asian Tsunami

 

“The historical confluence of events in the year 2008 is unprecedented.  Aside from Obama’s election, we witnessed the Financial Tsunami which appears to be a vast restructuring of the world economic order, and the Beijing Olympics, which can be viewed as the unofficial welcoming of China into the world community as a nation of the first rank,” said Paul JJ Payack, president and chief word analyst of GLM.  “This lends some credence to the idea that on January 20th, 2009 we are about to embark on the second decade of the second millennium.”  To the popular mind, History rarely follows chronology: the Fifties ended with JFK’s Assassination in 1963; the Sixties with the Nixon’s resignation in ‘74; the Eighties with the fall of the Berlin Wall; while the Nineties, as well as the 20th century persisted until 9/11/2001.

 

 

CNN Sunday Morning on the Top Words of 2008

  

 

 

Word Christmas Stronger Than Ever in World Media 

 

Contrary to assumption that “Holiday season” pushing Christmas aside

 

Austin, TX December 23, 2008 (Update) – The Global Language Monitor (www.LanguageMonitor.com) has found that contrary to the assumption that the word Christmas is being pushed aside by more secular or politically neutral terms, ‘Christmas’ is used over 600% more than ‘Holiday Season’ in the global media.  GLM compared the use of Christmas along with that of ‘Holiday Season,’ ‘Xmas,’ Hanukah’ in a variety of spellings, and ‘Kwanzaa’. 

 

Since the 2005 season, Christmas has been used in about 85% of all global print and electronic media citations [2008, 84.6%; 2007, 85.5%; 2006, 84.1%; 2005, 84.1%].

 

In the global media, Christmas accounted for about 84.6% of all citations with Holiday Season following at 12.6%, followed by Xmas (1.5%), Hanukah (0.9%) and Kwanzaa (0.3%).  On the Internet, Christmas led with 80.8% followed by Xmas (10.6%), Holiday Season (5.1%), Hanukah (2.5%), and Kwanzaa (0.7%).  Note:  The X in the word Xmas actually represents the Greek letter CHI, the first two Letters in the name Christ.

 

Festivus, the fictional holiday created during the hit Seinfeld television series, and Wintervale, sometimes used as a politically neutral substitute for the Christmas season were also measured with negligible results. 

 

GLM tracked the words and phrases in the print and electronic media, on the Internet and throughout the blogosphere.  The analysis also measured the global print and electronic media on its own. The results follow:

 

 

 

Global Media	Percentage		Internet	Percentage
Christmas	84.6%		Christmas	80.8%
Xmas	1.5%		Xmas	10.6%
Holiday Season	12.6%		Holiday Season	5.1%
Hannukah	0.9%		Hannukah	2.5%
Kwanzaa	0.3%		Kwanzaa	0.7%
Festivus	0.03%		Festivus	0.1%
Wintervale	0.00%		Wintervale	0.001%
Total	100.0%		Total	100.0%

 

“We thought it would prove interesting to see how the holidays are actually represented in the global media,” said Paul JJ Payack, president and chief word analyst of GLM.  “We were a bit surprised to see that the much discussed secularization of Christmas in the media was nowhere as widespread as speculated.”

 

Commentary:  “Obama-” as a Top Word of 2008

Austin, TX December 5 2008 – In an election cycle known for its many twists and turns, another unexpected result pops up in calculating the Top Words of 2008.  According to the analysis performed by the Global Language Monitor’s (www.Languagemonitor.com), the word ‘change’ was the Top Word of 2008, followed by ‘bailout’ and ‘Obamamania’. 

“However, it is interesting to note,” said Paul JJ Payack, President and Chief Word Analyst of GLM, “that if you included ‘obama-’ as a root word or word stem, Obama- in its many forms (ObamaMania, Obamamentum, Obmanomics, Obamacize, Obamanation, and even O-phoria and Obamalot as a stand-in for JFK’s Camelot, etc.), would have overtaken both change, and bailout for the top spot.

In a year of footnotes, GLM felt it important to add this interesting linguistic twist to the historical record.”

 

Obama’s oft cited refrain, “Yes, we can!”  was ranked third as Phrase of the Year, following “financial tsunami” and “global warming.”

 

Barack Obama was ranked the Top Name of the Year, followed by George W. Bush and Michael Phelps, the Olympic 8-time gold medal winner.

 

 

Watch: TODAY looks back at 2008 Primetime Special (NBC)

 

Change beats Bailout and Obamamania as top word of 2008

 

Financial Tsunami is Top Phrase, Barack Obama is Top Name

 

Austin, TX December 1, 2008 - Change is the Top Word,  Financial Tsunami is Top Phrase, and Barack Obama is Top Name atop the Global Language Monitor’s (www.Languagemonitor.com) annual global survey of the English language.

 

The estimated number of words in the English language stands at 998,751, just 1,249 from the million-word mark.

 

“Global English has been driven by three notable events during the course of 2008:  The US Presidential Election, the Financial Tsunami, and the Beijing Olympics.” said Paul JJ Payack, President of The Global Language Monitor. For 2008 our words were culled from throughout the English-speaking world which now numbers some 1.58 billion speakers and includes such diverse cultures as India, China, Philippines, and the EuroZone.

 

The analysis was completed using GLM’s Predictive Quantities Indicator (PQI), the proprietary algorithm that tracks words and phrases in the media and on the Internet. The words are tracked in relation to frequency, contextual usage and appearance in global media outlets, factoring in long-term trends, short-term changes, momentum and velocity.

 

The top words for 2007 were all ‘green’ oriented:  Hybrid was the Top Word, the Top Phrase was Climate Change, and the Top Name was Al Gore.(who won the Nobel Prize) for his efforts on Global Warming through ‘An Inconvenient Truth’. In an odd twist of history, Gore also won an academy award for the film.

 

The Top Word for 2006 were ’sustainable,’ the Top Phrase was ‘Stay the Course’ (President Bush repeatedly describing his Iraq Strategy), and the Top Name was Dafur.

 

The Top Ten Words of 2008

1. Change – The top political buzzword of the 2008 US Presidential campaign.
2. Bailout – Would have been higher but was not in the media until Mid-September.
3. Obamamania – Describing the worldwide reaction to Barack Obama’s campaign and subsequent victory in the US presidential race.
4. Greenwashing – Repositioning a product to stress its Earth-friendly attributes.
5. Surge – Military and political strategy often cited as reducing violence in Iraq.
6. Derivative – Exotic financial instruments used to cleverly package junk-grade debt.
7. Subprime – Mortgages that were packaged as derivatives.
8. Foreclosure – The end-result of the sub-prime mess.
9. Phelpsian:  New word coined to describe the Phelpsian Pheat of winning eight gold medals at the Beijing Olympics.
10. Chinglish – The often amusing Chinese/English language hybrid that Beijing tried to stamp out before the Olympics began.

 The Top Ten Phrases of 2008

1. Financial Tsunami – Worldwide financial meltdown ultimately stemming from derivatives used to package subprime mortgages.
2. Global Warming – The No. 2 buzzword of the US Presidential Campaign.
3. Yes We Can — Yes, indeed, he could and he did.
4. Lame Duck – What happens when you wait 2 ½ months from election to inauguration.
5. Working Class Whites – Apparently, working Class Whites is used as a code word for whites who are working class. 
6. “It is, what it is” – On everyone’s lips this year meaning ‘unfortunately, those are the facts’.
7. Lip Synching:  The fate of Lin Miaoke, the little girl who didn’t sing the song the whole world sings in the Olympics opening ceremony.
8. Price of oil – Oil was supposed to topping out about now at $200/barrel.
9. Super Tuesday – When the race for the Democratic nomination was supposed to be decided.
10. Suddenness Happens – Top Chinglish Phrase from the Beijing Olympics.

The Top Ten Names for 2008

1. Barack Obama –. President-elect of the United States.
2. George W. Bush – Lame Duck, No. 43, The Decider.
3. Michael Phelps — The top name of the top televison spectacle of all time (the Beijing Olympics)
4. Hilary Clinton – She said ‘he can’t win;’ now she is his Secretary of State.
5. Vladimir Putin – The supreme leader of Russia, whatever his title.
6. Bono — U2’s front man also known for his efforts to raise awareness about AIDS in African, Third World debt and Unfair Trade practices.
7. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad – Iran now claims 5,000 nuclear centrifuges.
8. Sarah Palin – Governor of Alaska and vice presidential nominee of the Republican party.
9. John McCain – Soon to be the answer to a trivia question: Mondale, Dole, Dukakis ….
10. Beyonce – The R&B singer AKA as Sasha Fierce.

The Top Celeb Couple:  Sarkozy and Carla Bruni – Big hit for his policies and her former supermodel status (replacing David Beckham and Posh Spice).

 

10 Most Confusing (yet widely used) High Tech Buzzwords for 2008

Cloud Computing, Green Washing and Buzzword Compliant

Austin Texas November 21, 2008 — In its third annual Internet and media analysis, The Global Language Monitor (www.LanguageMonitor.com) has found the most confusing yet frequently cited high tech buzzwords of 2008 to be cloud computing, green washing, and buzzword compliant followed by resonate, de-duping, and virtualization. 

Rounding out the Top Ten were Web 2.0, versioning, word clouds, and petaflop.  The most confusing Acronym for 2008 was SaaS (software as a service).

 

Paul JJ Payack, president of the Global Language Monitor, said “The words we use in high technology continue to become even more obtuse even as they move out of the realm of jargon and into the language at large.”

The Most Confusing Yet Frequently Cited High Tech Words of 2008 with Commentary follow:

1. Cloud Computing – Distributing or accessing programs and services across the Internet.  (The Internet is represented as a cloud.) 
2. Green washing – Repositioning your product so that its shortfalls are now positioned as environmental benefits:  Not enough power?  Just re-position as energy-saving.
3. Buzzword Compliant — Including the latest buzzwords in literature about a product or service in order to make it ‘resonate’ with the customer.
4. Resonate – Not the tendency of a system to oscillate at maximum amplitude, but the ability to relate to (or resonate with) a customer’s desires.
5. De-duping – shorthand for de-duplication, that is, removing redundant data from a system.
6. Virtualization – Around since dinosaurs walked the planet (the late ‘70s) virtualization now applies to everything from infrastructures to I/O.
7. Web 2.0 – Now there’s talk of Web 3.0, just when we were finally getting used to Web 2.0.
8. Versioning – Creating new revisions (or versions) with fewer bugs and more features.
9. Word Clouds – Graphic representations of the words used in a text, the more frequently used, the larger the representation.
10. Petaflop –  A thousand trillion (or quadrillion) floating point operations per second  Often mistaken as a comment on the environmental group.

 

The Most Confusing Yet Frequently Cited Acronym for 2008:  SaaS — software-as-as-service to be differentiated, of course, from PaaS (platforms as a service) and IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-service).

 

Others words under consideration include the ever popular yet amorphous ‘solution’, 3G and SEO. In 2007 IPOD, Flash, Cookie, Nano and Cookie lead the list with SOA as the most confusing acronym

 

In 2005, HTTP, VoIP, Megapixel, Plasma, & WORM were the leading buzzwords.

 

The analysis was completed using GLM’s Predictive Quantities Indicator (PQI), the proprietary algorithm that tracks words and phrases in the media and on the Internet.  The words are tracked in relation to frequency, contextual usage and appearance in global media outlets.  This analysis was performed in earlier this month. 

 

 

 

  

Complete Coverage of the 2008 Elections

 

  

Nicholas D. Kristof: Obama and the war on brains

 

 

 

 

Obama “Yes, We Can” Speech Ranked With “I have a Dream,” “Tear Down this Wall,” and JFK Inaugural

Austin, TX, USA November 7, 2008 – In an analysis completed earlier today, the Global Language Monitor has found that Barak Obama’s “Yes, We Can” speech delivered Tuesday night in Chicago’s Grant Park ranked favorably in tone, tenor and rhetorical flourishes with memorable political addresses of the recent past including Martin Luther King, Jr.’s   “I have a Dream” speech, “Tear Down his Wall,” by Ronald  Reagan and John F. Kennedy’s Inaugural Address.  GLM, has been tracking the language used in the debates and speeches of the Presidential and Vice Presidential candidates throughout the bruising 2008 campaign.  In nearly every category, from grade level to the use of passive voice, even the average numbers of letters in the words he chose, Obama’s Victory Speech was very similar in construction to the speeches of King, Reagan and Kennedy.

 

 Obama Speech a Winner

 

“As is appropriate for a forward-looking message of hope and reconciliation, words of change and hope, as well as future-related constructions dominated the address,” said Paul JJ Payack President and Chief Word Analyst of the Global Language Monitor.  “Evidently, Obama is at his best at connecting with people at the 7th to 8th grade range, communicating directly to his audience using simple yet powerful rhetorical devices, such as the repetition of the cadenced phrase ‘Yes, we can’, which built to a powerful conclusion.”

 

Obama’s Victory Speech also was similar in construction to his 2004 Democratic Convention address, which first brought him to widespread national attention.  

The statistical breakdown follows.

 

 

For a future-oriented message of hope and vision the passive voice was used frequently but effectively.   Examples include:  “There will be setbacks and false starts.  It was also noted that Obama spoke in the authoritative voice of the future Commander-in-Chief with such phrasings as, “To those who would tear the world down – We will defeat you.  Some commentators noticed the absence of the collapse of the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers in the 2001 terrorist attacks from Obama’s catalogue of significant events of last 106 years.  Historical comparisons follow.

 

 

Kennedy Inaugural Address	10.8
Reagan ‘Tear Down This Wall”	9.8
Lincoln “Gettysburg Address”	9.1
Martin Luther King:  ”I have a dream”	8.8
Obama 2004 Democrat Convention	8.3
Obama Victory Speech “Yes, we can”	7.4

 

 

 

‘Change’, ‘Cataclysmic Events,’ and ‘Global Financial Tsunami’ Dominate Concerns of the American Electorate on Nov. 4

 

 

Austin, TX, USA November 4, 2008 – In an analysis completed just hours before voting began for the 2008 the US Presidential Elections, Austin, Texas-based Global Language Monitor has found that ‘Change’, ‘‘Cataclysmic Events,’ and ‘Global Financial Tsunami’ related words and phrases dominate the Top Ten Concerns of the American Electorate on Nov. 4, 2008.

 

The results are based on an on-going 18-month analysis of the political language and buzzwords used throughout the presidential since before the primaries began.  GLM’s uses its PQI Index, a proprietary algorithm that scours the global print and electronic media, the Internet, and blogosphere for ‘hot’ political buzzwords and then ranks them according to year-over-year change, acceleration and directional momentum.  Political buzzwords are terms or phrases that become loaded with emotional freight beyond the normal meaning of the word.    

 

 

Top Ten Concerns of the American Electorate on November 4, 2008.

 

1.     Change is key.  Change favors Obama over McCain 3:2.

2.     Cataclysmic events, global warming and climate change rank higher than all other issues except change.   

3.     The Global Financial Tsunami and related terms permeate the Election and is that persistent low-humming heard in the background.

4.     Experience counts.  Experience favors McCain over Obama 4:3.

5.     Concerns persist about Obama’s experience, background, and past and current associations.

6.     Gender is ongoing issue:  it began with Hillary and continues with Palin though it is disguised in all sorts of well-meaning platitudes.

7.     For many in this campaign, gender actually trumps race. 

8.     For all the concern about race, it actually seems to be having a positive effect on the Obama campaign, in its an ongoing, just beneath the surface dialogue, with millions (both black and white) voting for Obama precisely BECAUSE he is a black man.  This is viewed as separating us (and in some sense liberating us) from a long, painful history.

9.     Working Class Whites IS used as a code word for whites who are working class.  No other moniker, such as Reagan Democrats or Soccer Moms has caught on in this election cycle.

10.  Obama, to his great credit, is no longer perceived as ‘aloof’.

 

What’s the advantage of the PQI over the Polls?

 

According to Paul JJ Payack, president and chief Word Analyst of the Global Language Monitor: 

 

The PQI is, perhaps,