Feb 10, 2015 10:54 AM EST By Russell Westerholm, UniversityHerald Reporter

A new study on the words humans use on a daily basis has suggested people tend to speak positively more often than negatively.

According to Medical Daily, authors of a study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found humans tend to have a positive outlook in terms of their choice of words. It is a hypothesis researchers have been trying to prove since 1969, but online sharing has made this new study much easier.

"We used Twitter because (1) we have 10 percent of all tweets streaming to our research group; (2) it's open (in contrast to Facebook); and (3) social media is an important medium of expression and contrasts strongly with our other corpora, such as the Google Books data set," study co-lead-author Peter Sheridan Dodds, a mathematician at University of Vermont, told Medical Daily.

For their study, the researchers also ranked different languages in terms of overall happiness. English ranked third behind Portuguese (2) and Spanish (1). It also proved that languages often deemed as harsh-sounding are still generally happy, like German (4), Russian (7) and Arabic (8).

"We tried to cover as many major languages as possible, spread out around the world, and diverse in culture," Dodds said.

The study authors hope to narrow down their results further with future work.

"We're presently measuring happiness for U.S. states and cities, and planning to include several other countries now that we have this new and exciting data set for many languages," study co-lead-author Chris Danforth, Dodds' colleague, told Medical Daily.

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