Average word length dynamics as indicator of cultural changes in society
This research addresses the problem of tracking cultural changes in society through linguistic patterns, but it is incremental as it applies existing methods to new data without introducing novel techniques.
The study analyzed the dynamics of average word length in Russian and English using the Google Books Ngram corpus over the last two centuries, finding that it slightly increased in the 19th century, grew rapidly in most of the 20th century, and then decreased from the late 20th to early 21st century, with content words and personal pronouns identified as key contributors to these changes.
Dynamics of average length of words in Russian and English is analysed in the article. Words belonging to the diachronic text corpus Google Books Ngram and dated back to the last two centuries are studied. It was found out that average word length slightly increased in the 19th century, and then it was growing rapidly most of the 20th century and started decreasing over the period from the end of the 20th - to the beginning of the 21th century. Words which contributed mostly to increase or decrease of word average length were identified. At that, content words and functional words are analysed separately. Long content words contribute mostly to word average length of word. As it was shown, these words reflect the main tendencies of social development and thus, are used frequently. Change of frequency of personal pronouns also contributes significantly to change of average word length. The other parameters connected with average length of word were also analysed.