Christmas & New Year in Belgium: Dutch vs. French vs. English

For New Year's Eve, I analyzed the Google search volume for Christmas and New Year-related terminology in Belgium's first (Dutch) and second language (French) as well as today's international lingua franca (English). This meant Kerst/Kerstfeest/Kerstdag/Kerstman vs. Noël (Christmas) vs. Nieuwjaar, vs. Nouvelle Année/Nouvel An (New Year) vs. Christmas/Santa Claus/New Year:



For Christmas, French won clearly while for the New Year Dutch narrowly beat out French. English was of course behind though when taking both holidays together not insignificant: Belgium is indeed becoming more and more international in its population and orientation. Why the two holidays showed opposite patterns as far as the primary languages were concerned was unclear. Maybe the search volume just wasn't big enough. Anyway, let's have a look at the rankings for the different (groups of) terms as far as the 11 provinces were concerned—treating Brussels as a province for convenience's sake.


Yellow indicates a Dutch term or Dutch-speaking province while turquoise marks French terms and French-speaking provinces. The capital district of Brussels is bilingual. As expected, the Dutch terms came first in a Dutch-speaking province while the French ones did in a French-speaking province. The English terms were searched most in a Dutch-speaking province (Limburg) and Brussels. On average though, Antwerp won out, helped by its larger population; Walloon Brabant came in last due to its low population. In the bottom section of the table, I made a quick attempt to rework the ranking numbers taking the population in consideration. Interesting was here that while for the individual terms nothing changed, the average now saw Luxembourg as the winner and East Flanders as the loser.

Christmas vs. Halloween vs. Easter vs. Thanksgiving vs. Valentine's Day

My yummy Christmas dinner is almost digested ;-) Time to check on the old Yuletide's status in comparison with the other big—esp. in the US—holidays.



As expected, each holiday had its own seasonal peak and Christmas had the biggest one. Second was Halloween: everyone likes to dress up... Easter peaked in March-April (not fixed in the normal sense). Note that Canada's Thanksgiving Day in October was dwarfed by the US one in November. Valentine's Day was last. Let's have a look at the country rankings for each holiday:











The results were more or less as expected. A few observations: Halloween with its Celtic roots was also important in Ireland (no. 3) and even in Belgium (no. 6)—as a Belgian, I have actually no clue why that would be; of course, I haven't lived there in decades. Why Easter registered so heavily in Australia (no.1) and New Zealand (no. 3) was also kind of puzzling. That Thanksgiving registered at all outside the US and Canada might provide further proof of the supersized influence of esp. the US in the world. South African Googlers were the second-most interested in Valentine's.


Photo Copyright j_wijnands, CC Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 Generic

Copyright vs. Trademark vs. Royalties vs. Intellectual Property in the UK, the US, Germany, Belgium and France

Today, a non-US-elections-related post... I faced off copyright-related terms: copyright (droit d'auteur/Urheberrecht/auteursrecht(en)) vs. trademark (marque déposée/Marke/eingetragenes Ware/handelsmerk/merk) vs. Royalties (redevance(s)/Abgabe(n)) vs. intellectual property (propriété intellectuelle/geistiges Eigentum/intellektuelles Eigentum/intellectueel eigendom). I did this for the UK, the US, Germany, Belgium and France. I included the translation of the terms in French, German and Dutch in the Google Insights for Search analysis when applicable so as to get a more accurate picture. First, I faced off the different countries for copyright:



There was the most interest in copyright in the UK, the least in France. A November 2004 peak in the UK could be observed: I don't know why. Over the 2004-now time span, Google-popularity went down in every country however. How about trademark?



This time, Belgians were the most interested, the French again the least. The UK was markedly less into trademark than copyright while Belgium was vice versa. I wonder if this had to do with different legislative traditions? It could also be that Marke and merk are too generic. I redid this analysis without those two terms:



This did change the situation. The US were now clearly the most interested in trademark and Germany and Belgium ended up much lower. Again, all countries' trend lines declined through time. Next, royalties:



France was no. 1 and this was substantially due to a big peak in October 2005. This time too, I wasn't able to ascertain why. There is no real Dutch term for royalties, the English word is commonly used. The US scored the lowest for this term. Looking at the evolution of the trend lines January 1, 2004 through now, the downward trend was esp. noticeable in France but the UK, the US and Germany also saw declines. Belgium on the other hand saw a slight increase. Finally, let's look at the intellectual property graph:



The US and the UK basically shared the lead while German Googlers cared the least for geistiges Eigentum. All countries lost interest between 2004 and now.

It seemed to me that obtaining country graphs for the four terms together would be useful. I started with the UK:



Copyright towered over the three other terms, even when not counting the big November 2004 peak. Next, the US:



Copyright again ruled, intellectual property was the least interesting. Let's look at Germany next:



Copyright and trademark were at the top, intellectual property hardly showed. However, when we took out the too generic term Marke, the graph changed drastically:



Copyright was alone in charge now, both trademark and intellectual property held hardly any interest. Then I analyzed Belgium:



Trademark was no. 1, intellectual property was in the doldrums. I eliminated merk again:



Copyright dominated while trademark almost disappeared; even intellectual property scored higher. At long last, I investigated the data for France.



Royalties won out in la douce France, trademark hardly existed. Intellectual property held some interest.

2009 NEA Jazz Masters

Last Friday, the US National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) celebrated its 2009 Jazz Masters: George Benson, Toots Thielemans, Lee Konitz, Jimmy Cobb, Snooky Young and Rudy Van Gelder. The latter is actually a recording engineer so that left me with five musicians to face off:



Benson totally outranked the other four but this was because he is also or even more so a mainstay of pop/rock music. Thielemans was second, closely followed by Konitz. Cobb and Young barely registered among the Googling crowd. I tried to enhance the discriminating power by leaving out Benson:



This graph basically confirmed the first one. The trend lines didn't cross. So I went back to my first analysis and looked at the regional interest information, first for Benson:



Surprisingly, he scored the highest by far in Georgia (the country, not the US state!), followed by Indonesia and South Africa. I am at a loss how to explain this. Maybe a Benson fan can enlighten me? The US wasn't even in the top 10! Next, Thielemans:



Jean-Baptiste Frédéric Isidor "Toots" Thielemans is my personal favorite—I'm Belgian after all ;-) —and naturally got the highest Google-popularity in Belgium, his native country where he even received the title of baron in 2001, a rare honor for an artist. I include a great picture of him playing his harmonica. He expanded its range and versatility as nobody else before him. In that he reminds me of another jazz late great of Belgian extraction, Django Reinhardt, who also played an instrument not normally associated with jazz at that time, viz. the guitar. Thielemans' second country was The Netherlands, then came Hungary. Again, the US didn't get in the top 10. Let's see what I found for Konitz:






Konitz was the second American to be more Google-popular abroad than in the US, this time Italy took the honors. The US did come in eighth. Then I checked on Cobb:



There was very little data for this musician but for what it's worth this was the top 3: the US, South Africa, Vietnam. Finally, how about Young?



He had the same paucity of data as well as the same top 3.

Library vs. Bibliothèque vs. Bibliotheek vs. Bibliothek in Canada, Belgium and Switzerland

Today, a comparison involving multilingual countries and their Google searches for certain words. Let's begin with Canada:



Library totally dominated here although its popularity declined somewhat through time. In Canada, approximately 75% of the population speaks English and 25% French. When doing a Google Insights for Search test for the same word in both languages, limited geographically to internet users from Canada, one would expect to see proportional Google-popularity. For instance, we would expect to find library and bibliothèque in a 75%/25% proportion. Instead, the actual overall proportion (2004-present) was 94%/6%. Odd! However, the second test with bookstore/bookshop and librairie came out with a perfect 75%/25% split. I would guess that this inconsistency might have something to do with a too limited data set for Google searches in Canada, rather than a cultural distinction—Québequois don't like libraries... not likely. Still, it is puzzling. Anyone have any other ideas to explain this? I did the same search for Belgium (my native country):



This time, bibliotheek was most popular by far. Now, Belgium has about 60% Dutch-speakers and 40% French-speakers. The proportions of local Google searches were as follows: bibliotheek vs. bibliothèque (library) 83%/17% and boekwinkel/boekhandel vs. librairie (bookstore) 64%/36%. I again obtained one expected and one unexpected result, just like for Canada. The library pair proportion was off but the bookstore one was "correct." I tried one more country, Switzerland (only the two main languages out of the four):



Bibliothek was at the top. The Helvetian Federation's population consists of about 65% German-speakers, 20% French-speakers, 5% Italian-speakers, 1% Romansh-speakers and the remainder speakers of unofficial, immigrants' languages, e.g., Serbo-Croatian. For the sake of determining the proportions when facing off German and French equivalents, I recalculated the proportion of those two languages as if they were the only ones: 75%/25%. Bibliothek vs. bibliothèque (library) produced 63%/37% which was not too far off. Buchhandlung vs. librairie (bookstore) yielded 56%/44%. All words displayed a diminishing trend. In conclusion, Switzerland showed a different "proportionality" pattern than Canada and Belgium (library face-off not too bad & bookstore face-off not OK vs. library face-off not OK & bookstore face-off OK). Looking at it another way, Canada and Switzerland saw a search-quantity decline, Belgium didn't.

Update 10-6-08: I took the advice given to me on the LanguageHat blog and fixed the searches a bit. First, Canada:



No significant difference could be observed, except for a slightly higher occurrence of bibliothèque/bibliotheque. Next, Belgium:



Here the increase caused by adding the non-accented bibliotheque spellng was more significant: the library duo yielded an 81%/19% but this was still not close to the proportion of language speakers. Finally, Switzerland's new graph was as follows:



Both Buchhandlung/Buchladen and bibliothèque/bibliotheque grew. Bibliothek vs. bibliothèque/bibliotheque yielded a 64%/36% proportion, Buchhandlung/Buchladen" vs. librairie a 66%/34%. The first change doesn't seems meaningful to me; the second one does bring the numbers a bit closer to the language estmates. One final thing: the proportion of French-speakers in Canada is of course a matter of contention, I picked 25% as a reasonable number, esp. taking into consideration the "mixed" families.