What Twitter can tell us about the difference between Canadians and Americans
National stereotypes are a great way to reduce an entire country to a few simple traits. And by “great,” we mean it’s pretty dumb, actually. Saying all Germans are “organized” or all English people drink tea erases a whole people’s vast diversity, and they’re also not very accurate.
Researchers from McMaster University, however, have shown that one national stereotype could be true (fortunately it’s a somewhat positive one): Canadians really are more polite. On Twitter, at least. The researchers looked at 40 million English tweets from Canada and the United States. First, they found the words that were most distinctive (note, this is not which words they used most overall, but which words they used most in comparison to the other country), and then they had research participants rate them by how “positive” or “negative” they are.
Here are representative terms from each country, though the study got rid of a number of racialized or country-specific terms that would be giveaways as to which country the Tweet’s author was from:
Without even digging into the data, you can probably see that the Canadian terms on the left are generally more positive than the American ones. Also, Canadians tend to use a lot fewer emoji in tweets. Based on these findings, you could argue that the stereotypes are undoubtedly true and thus Canadians, on the whole, are nicer than Americans. Don’t jump to that conclusion just yet, though.
The study’s lead author Bryor Snefjella is very careful when pointing out what this means. The researchers do not conclude that Canadians are actually nicer than Americans (and other studies have proven this stereotype false). What it does show is that in the language Canadians and Americans use, the stereotype checks out. Snefjella tells Quartz: “We are not saying ‘Canadians talk nice because they are nice’ or ‘Americans talk rudely because they’re rude.’ It seems rather than there being a Canadian or American ‘essence,’ being Canadian or American is something we do, and we seem to do it through our language choices as nations.”
So perhaps our stereotypes do leak out in our online behaviors. We conform to stereotypes on social media because we are projecting “being Canadian” or “being American.” And perhaps it’s this language usage that has led to the creation of these national stereotypes in the first place. However, most of the language Canadians and Americans use overlap with each other, and so the real differences are rather minor. At the very least, this will lead to new research that may help us determine why these stereotypes are so persistent.
