Cognitive forces shape the dynamics of word usage across multiple languages

TL;DR

This paper uncovers that word usage across multiple languages exhibits 16-year oscillations linked to cultural and historical trends, modeled as dynamical systems near a critical point, revealing insights into collective cognition and sociocultural influences.

Contribution

It introduces a mathematical model capturing oscillatory patterns in word usage across languages, connecting linguistic dynamics to cultural and cognitive processes.

Findings

Word usage oscillates with a 16-year cycle across languages.

Similar oscillatory patterns group semantically related words.

Trends reflect cultural and historical periods.

Abstract

The analysis of thousands of time series in different languages reveals that word usage presents oscillations with a prevalence of 16-year cycles, mounted on slowly varying trends. These components carry different information: while similar oscillatory patterns gather semantically related words, similar trends group together keywords representative of cultural and historical periods. We interpreted the regular oscillations as cycles of interest and saturation, whose behavior could be captured using a simple mathematical model. Driving the model with the empirical trends, we were able to explain word frequency traces across multiple languages throughout the last three centuries. Our results suggest that word frequency usage is poised at dynamical criticality, close to a Hopf bifurcation which signals the emergence of oscillatory dynamics. Crucially, our model explains the oscillatory synchronization observed within groups of words and provides an interpretation of this phenomenon in terms of the cultural context driving collective cognition. These findings contribute to unravel how our use of language is shaped by the interplay between human cognition and sociocultural forces.