Summary: Michael Rosen and Dr Laura Wright guide us through the top 20 words in English. Not the best or most popular (that would include tentacular, ping-pong and sesquipedalian (look it up - it's a cracker). Plus a lot of swearing. No this is the 20 most commonly used. It's actually quite a boring list - full of 'And', 'I', 'of' etc - but look a little closer and it tells you all about the structure of language. The little words you really can't do without that glue all the other ones together.
Key Points:
The top 20 words - 1-5:
- The
- Be
- To
- Of
- And
Easily forgettable because they become entrenched in your brain so you process them faster and don't really notice them.
The top 20 words - 6-10
- A
- In
- That
- Have
- I
2/3 of our language is not old English (Anglo-Saxon), it's from when England was ruled by the Anglo-Normans (French speaking). Although most of our language is not old-English, the most common words that we use on a daily basis, are.
These words carry the language as they are all essential from grammatical viewpoints.
In-built sexism of language? 'He' appears 16th on the list and 'his' is number 23, but 'she' doesn't feature until number 30.
Grammatical words: glue that sticks language together; connectives, pronouns and other little words such as 'the' and 'of'. Words come out in prefabricated chunks and then are stuck together using grammatical words.
Content words: words which can be easily defined.
The top 20 words - 10-20:
Top 20 words are dominated by grammatical words.
Top 20 words are almost identical to what they were 1000-1500 years ago. They have a slightly different order and there are a few differences, but they're essentially the same - striking similarities.
Can we see the influence of other languages creeping in?
61st on the list: people. First Romance word on the list that came in with the Anglo-Normans.
You have to get quite far down the list before other languages creep in, despite 2/3 of our language not being Anglo-Saxon English.
This kind of list comes from a branch of linguistics called Corpus Linguistics. It looks at the frequency and distribution of words in large bodies of text or speech. You can apply it to anything - political debates, lonely hearts columns or pop songs.
The internet is a hybrid between spoken and written language - chatty language but written, for example on blogs.
The media has created associations between words, which has contributed to the creation of social attitudes.
Linguistics has changed massively with the development of technology.
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