NewScientist‘s Sophia Chen reports (3 December 2016) on the discovery of word life cycles:
THE media tends to interpret culture in annual cycles. Critics publish end-of-year best-of lists and Oxford Dictionaries just selected “post-truth” as its word of the year. But the actual words we use seem to operate on a 14-year cycle.
Marcelo Montemurro at the University of Manchester, UK, and Damián Zanette at Argentina’s National Council for Scientific and Technical Research identified 5630 commonly used nouns and analysed how their popularity changed over the last three centuries.
A curious pattern emerged. They found that English words rose in popularity and then fell out of favour in cycles of about 14 years, although cycles over the past century have tended to be a year or two longer.
They also found evidence of 14-year cycles in French, German, Italian, Russian and Spanish. The popularity of related nouns – such as king, queen and duchess – tended to rise and fall together over time (Palgrave Communications, doi.org/btwd).
They don’t know why – or even if it’s a statistical fluke. I did like the analogy:
These results support previous work suggesting that language evolves in a patterned way, similar to how genes are transmitted from parent to offspring, says Mark Pagel at the University of Reading, UK.
“Language is not all over the place,” he says. “It’s remarkably consistent.”
From the abstract of the academic article:
The specific phase relationships between different words show structure at two independent levels: first, there is a weak global phase modulation that is primarily linked to overall shifts in the vocabulary across time; and second, a stronger component dependent on well defined semantic relationships between words. In particular, complex network analysis reveals that semantically related words show strong phase coherence. Ultimately, these previously unknown patterns in the statistics of language may be a consequence of changes in the cultural framework that influences the thematic focus of writers.
