A huge thank you to everyone who contributed to our very special seasonal Festive Corpus. Our Corpus elves have been busy analysing almost 3000 words to see what you associate with this time of year. It seems this is a season all about family, love and snow!
The Language Research Team here at Cambridge analysed the Cambridge English Corpus, our multi-billion-word database, to see which words are most commonly used by English speakers with ‘Christmas’. The top 300 words revealed a strong association between the holidays and a sense of family and positive relationships. This has now been confirmed by the Festive Corpus too, with family revealing itself as the most popular word, and friends, children and friendship, all appearing in the top 100.
The most frequent category to appear however is words relating to feelings and emotions, with love, joy and peace all in the top 10. These appeared more frequently in our Festive Corpus, suggesting that our teachers and friends of Cambridge have a more emotional approach to language than the general population of English speakers!
The third most popular word – snow – may not be surprising considering its close links to the season in many festive songs and films, but it actually promoted the most creative use of words through descriptions – crunchy, feathery, and glistening. Along with snow descriptors, people also associate the holidays with the fun you can have with the fluffy substance – building snowman, making snow angels, and having snowball fights!
What made this Festive Corpus special though, is the international nature of respondents. We saw this reflected with the inclusion of traditional foodstuffs and items from around the world: for example, zabomba (a Spanish drum used to accompany Christmas carols); vanillekipferl (a popular biscuit across much of central Europe) and turron (a type of nougat in Spain, Portugal and Latin America).
Why not use a festive corpus for warm-up activities with your class?
Create your own seasonal corpus by asking your students to come up with the ten words they most associate with Christmas or the holidays. Using free software, you can then create a word cloud, where the size of each word corresponds to its popularity.
This can be extended by challenging your students to use as many of these words as possible in your last class before the holidays. Carry on as usual with your normal discussion activities and spoken exercises, but print out the words from your seasonal corpus on a piece of paper, and have students cross off each word as they use it. Then, at the end of the class, the students with the most words crossed off are the winners. The added challenge of fitting in some festive vocabulary should liven up role-play exercises and you can award extra points for the most creative ways your students fit in the words!
To find out more about the Cambridge English Corpus, here’s an interview we did with language researcher Sarah Grieves.