BBC radio - Top 20 words in English

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.

List of 20 most common words

Top 5

• The
• Be
• To
• Of
• And

(Mostly grammatical words, intrenched in brain and process them faster so don't realise they're being said]

Top 10

• The
• Be
• To
• Off
• And
• A
• In 
• That
• Have
• I

Anglo-saxans(old english) words despite 2 thirds of our language is not old english but from where we were ruled by anglo-normans (french speaking. The language we use everyday is historically english. No 'she'?

A study was carried out to show the difference between the characteristic of male and female speech, with men we get noun and numbers - stuck in facts whereas women use language talking about other folk using 'she'. 

Grammatical words- Connectives and Pronouns are used to keep company to other words

Content words- Have meaning and are able to define them easily.

Top 20

• The
•  Be
•  To
•  Of
•  And
•  A
•  In
•  That
•  Have
•  I
•  It
•  For
•  Not
•  On
•  With
•  He
•  As
•  You
•  Do
•  At

Dominated by grammatical words, the most frequent noun used is time which is due to people basing their live around structuring their life. 

Can we see the influence of other languages creeping in? Number 61 of most common .- 'people' - most romance word, possibly intermingled with northeners. 

List of old english words - 1000 years ago, essentially the same words apart from a couple which alternate but the similarities are striking. 

 

This kind of list comes from a branch of lingustics 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.

Word frequency of later albums- Rolling stone

1960s'-70's

• easy 
• strong 
• mercy
• all right
• cry 

How media have created assocaition between words creating social attitudes. Linguistics before the age of technology, as technology has changed language massively.