Showing posts with label New Year. Show all posts
Showing posts with label New Year. Show all posts

31 December 2008

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.

12 September 2008

Cat vs. Dog vs. Horse in the US, the UK, Brazil, Japan and India

Today, a face-off between the three animals that are the most closely associated with humans since ancient times: cat, dog and horse. However, instead of the usual worldwide comparison, Google Trends also allows for zooming in on specific countries' search patterns. For starters, let's see what this gives for the US:


Scale is based on the average traffic of dog from United States in all years
cat 0.48
dog 1.00
horse 0.41

In the US, dog is twice as popular as the other two. Cat barely beats horse. How about the UK?


Scale is based on the average traffic of dog from United Kingdom in all years
cat 0.63
dog 1.00
horse 0.85

Lo and behold, horse is more Google-popular than cat in the UK! How about Brazil?


Scale is based on the average traffic of dog from Brazil in all years
cat 0.92
dog 1.00
horse 0.53

Through the four years, from a basically equal position horse declined in popularity while the stable dog at most has a slight edge over cat. Maybe Japan looks different too?


Scale is based on the average traffic of cat from Japan in all years
cat 1.00
dog 0.85
horse 0.25

Yes! Japan is most interested in neko a.k.a. cat. Last but not least [cliché alert], it's India's turn:


Scale is based on the average traffic of cat from India in all years
cat 1.00
dog 0.50
horse 0.30

Cat also dominates in India and what's more, it has an impressive seasonal peak at about New Year's. Surely, there must be an explanation : can anyone help me out?

09 September 2008

Future vs. Past vs. Present

Today, a basic word face-off: past, present and future.


Scale is based on the average worldwide traffic of past in all years
future 2.04
past 1.00
present 0.62

Unsurprisingly, future is the clear leader, present is the least interesting... Notice the seasonal peaks of future and concurrent valleys of past and present, all at year's end.