Global Language Monitor

Global Language Monitor

Type	Media Analytics
Industry	High Technology
Founded	1999 (1999)
Founder	Paul JJ Payack
Headquarters	Headquarters: Austin, Texas, United States
Products	Olympics and World Cup Brand and Ambush Marketing Analyses, annual Top 55 Global Fashion Capitals, annual TrendTopper MediaBuzz College Guide, Annual Top Words, Phrases, and Names of the Year (for Global English), annual Top Business Buzzwords, Top Political Buzzwords, Top Politically(in)Correct Words
Website	www.languagemonitor.com

The Global Language Monitor (GLM) is an Austin, Texas-based company that collectively documents, analyzes, and tracks trends in language usage worldwide, with a particular emphasis upon the English language. It is particularly known for its Word of the Year,^[1] political analysis,^[2][3] college and university rankings,^[4] High Tech buzzwords,^[5][6] and media analytics.^[7]

History

Founded in Silicon Valley in 2003 by Paul J.J. Payack, the GLM describes its role as "a media analytics company that documents, analyzes and tracks cultural trends in language the world over, with a particular emphasis upon Global English". GLM's main services include various products based on the Narrative Tracker technologies for global Internet and social media analysis. NarrativeTracker is based on global discourse, providing a real-time, accurate picture about any topic, at any point in time. NarrativeTracker analyzes the Internet, blogosphere, the top 275,000 print and electronic global media, as well as new social media sources as they emerge.^[8] In April 2008, GLM moved its headquarters from San Diego to Austin.^[9]

GLM announced "Emoji" as its Top Word of 2014 for Global English along with its complete lists of Top Words, Phrases and Names in December 2014.^[10]

Earlier in 2015 GLM has released:

• The Top Words of the First Fifteen Years of the 21st Century (and what they portend).^[11]
• The Top Words of 2115 (One hundred Years Hence)^[12]
• The AD 2076 Map of the Re-federalised United States (including VanCity and Scot's Land).^[13]
• The Top Trending Words of 2015 at Mid-Year ^[14]

Top Words, Stories, Phrases and Names of the Decade

The Top Words of the Decade from 2000 to 2009 were headed by Global Warming.^[15]

The Top Words of the Decade from 2000–2009

Word / Year / Comments

1. global warming (2000) Rated highly from Day One of the decade
2. 9/11 (2001) Another inauspicious start to the decade
3. Obama- (2008 ) The US President’s name as a ‘root’ word or ‘word stem’
4. bailout (2008) The Bank Bailout was but Act One of the crisis
5. evacuee/refugee (2005) After Katrina, refugees became evacuees
6. derivative (2007) Financial instrument or analytical tool that engendered the Meltdown
7. google (2007) Founders misspelled actual word ‘googol’
8. surge (2007) The strategy that effectively ended the Iraq War
9. Chinglish (2005) The Chinese-English Hybrid language growing larger as Chinese influence expands
10. tsunami (2004) Southeast Asian tsunami took 250,000 lives
11. H1N1 (2009) More commonly known as Swine Flu
12. subprime (2007) Subprime mortgages were another bubble to burst
13. dot.com (2000) The Dot.com bubble engendered no lifelines, no bailouts
14. Y2K (2000) The Year 2000: all computers would turn to pumpkins at the strike of midnight
15. misunderestimate (2002) One of the first and most enduring of Bushisms
16. chad (2000) Those Florida voter punched card fragments that the presidency would turn upon
17. twitter (2008) A quarter of a billion references on Google
18. WMD (2002) Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction
19. blog (2003) First called ‘web logs’ which contracted into blogs
20. texting (2004) Sending 140 character text messages over cell phones
21. slumdog (2008) Child inhabitants of Mumba’s slums
22. sustainable (2006) The key to ‘Green’ living where natural resources are never depleted
23. Brokeback (2004) New term for ‘gay’ from the Hollywood film ‘Brokeback Mountain’
24. quagmire (2004) Would Iraq War end up like Vietnam, another ‘quagmire’?
25. truthiness (2006) Stephen Colbert’s addition to the language appears to be a keeper

The Top Stories of the decade from 2000-2009

Rank/News Story/Comment

1. Rise of China The biggest story of the decade, outdistancing the No. 2 Internet story by 400%.
2. Iraq War The buildup, the invasion, the hunt for the WMDs, and the Surge were top in print and electronic media outlets.
3. 9/11 Terrorist Attacks The 9/11 Terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, DC seemed to set the tone for the new decade.
4. War on Terror President George W. Bush’s response to 9/11.
5. Death of Michael Jackson A remarkably high ranking considering that MJ’s death occurred in the final year of the decade.
6. Election of Obama to US presidency The rallying cries of ‘hope’ and ‘Yes, we can!’ resulting in the historic election of an African-American to the US presidency.
7. Global Recession of 2008/9 The ongoing world economic restructuring as opposed to the initial ‘economic meltdown’ or ‘financial tsunami’.
8. Hurricane Katrina New Orleans was devastated when the levies collapsed; scenes of death and destruction shocked millions the world over.
9. War in Afghanistan Now in its eighth year with an expansion into neighboring Pakistan.
10. Economic Meltdown/Financial Tsunami The initial shock of witnessing some 25% of the world’s wealth melting away seemingly overnight.
11. Beijing Olympics The formal launch of China onto the world stage.
12. South Asian tsunami The horror of 230,000 dead or missing, washed away in a matter of minutes was seared into the consciousness the global community.
13. War against the Taliban Lands controlled by the Taliban served as a safe haven from which al Qaeda would launch its terrorist attacks.
14. Death of Pope John Paul II The largest funeral in recent memory with some 2,000,000 pilgrims in attendance.
15. Osama bin-Laden eludes capture Hesitation to attack Tora Bora in 2002 has led to the continuing manhunt.

The Top Phrases of the Decade from 2000–2009

Word/Year/Comments

1. climate change (2000) Green words in every form dominant the decade
2. Financial Tsunami (2008) One quarter of the world’s wealth vanishes seemingly overnight
3. ground zero (2001) Site of 9/11terrorist attack in New York City
4. War on Terror (2001) Bush administration’s response to 9/11
5. Weapons of Mass Destruction (2003) Bush’s WMDs never found in Iraq or the Syrian desert
6. swine flu (2008) H1N1, please, so as not to offend the pork industry or religious sensitivities!
7. "Let’s Roll!" (2001) Todd Beamer’s last words before Flight 93 crashed into the PA countryside
8. Red State/Blue State (2004) Republican or Democratic control of states
9. carbon footprint (2007) How much CO² does an activity produce?
10. shock-and-awe (2003) Initial strategy of Iraq War
11. Ponzi scheme (2009) Madoff’s strategy reaped billions & heartache
12. Category 4 (2005) Force of Hurricane Katrina hitting New Orleans’ seawalls and levies
13. King of Pop (2000) Elvis was the King, MJ the King (of Pop)
14. "Stay the course" (2004) Dubya’s oft-stated guidance for Iraq War
15. "Yes, we can!" (2008) Obama’s winning campaign slogan
16. "Jai Ho!" (2008) Shout of joy from ‘Slumdog Millionaire’
17. "Out of the Mainstream" (2003) Complaint about any opposition’s political platform
18. Cloud computing (2007) Using the Internet as a large computational device
19. threat fatigue (2004) One too many terrorist threat alerts
20. same-sex marriage (2003) Marriage of gay couples

Annual fashion capital rankings

An annual ranking of the leading fashion capitals is produced by Global Language Monitor, a US-based company that tracks trends through language use worldwide. The 2017 top-sixty three fashion capitals, according to its rankings, are listed below.^[16]

Rank (2017)	City	Last
1	New York City	2
2	Paris	1
3	Barcelona	7
4	Milan	6
5	Rome	5
6	London	3
7	Amsterdam	23
8	Berlin	8
9	Las Vegas	23
10	Dubai	17
11	Singapore	14
12	Hong Kong	12
13	Florence	11
14	Los Angeles	4
15	Madrid	9
16	Bali	40
17	Seoul	56
18	Prague	33
19	Rio de Janeiro	18
20	Buenos Aires	29
21	Washington, D.C.	54
22	Moscow	22
23	Tokyo	10
24	Santiago	43
25	Vienna	34
26	Shanghai	15
27	Mumbai	38
28	Melbourne	49
29	Stockholm	46
30	Bangkok	50
31	Warsaw	42
32	Copenhagen	36
33	San Francisco	37
34	Sydney	13
35	São Paulo	16
36	Antwerpen	25
37	Johannesburg	48
38	Dallas	20
39	Austin	45
40	Abu Dhabi	Debut
41	St Petersburg	35
42	Cape Town	41
43	Mexico City	53
44	Portland, Oregon	Debut
45	Frankfurt	51
46	Boston	24
47	Kuala Lumpur	Debut
48	Johannesburg	37
49	Monaco	21
50	Montreal	47
51	New Delhi	39
52	Vancouver	52
53	Chicago, Illinois	27
54	Houston, Texas	30
55	Montreal	47
56	Dakar	Debut
57	Beirut	Debut
58	Kraków	44
59	Toronto	28
60	Lagos	Debut
61	Columbus	Debut
62	Accra	Debut
63	Caracas	Hiatus

High tech terms

On March 29, 2013 announced The Most Confusing High Tech Buzzwords of the Second Decade of the 21st century, thus far (2010, 2011, 2012 and 2013) with commentary follow:

2013 Rank, Buzzword, Last Year’s rank

1. Big Data (1) — Soon Human Knowledge will be doubling every second. ’Big’ does not begin to describe what’s coming at us.
2. Dark Data (New)- Might not have noticed it because … it is ‘Dark Data’ ‘Big Data’ has begun to spin off its own superlatives.
3. The Cloud (2) — All that data has got to go somewhere. Hint: it’s neither your phone nor your tablet.
4. Yottabytes (New) – Showing up on lots of technologists’ radar lately: a quadrillion gigabytes.
5. The Next Big Thing (3) — A cliché rendered ever more meaningless but still on everyone’s tongue.
6. Heisenbug (New) – A bug that disappears when you try to detect it, finally making the list after a steady ascent over the last decade.
7. 3-D Printer (New) – Watch this space. This technology has been used in CAD design for years and science fiction for decades — but now they are impinging upon everyday life.
8. Phablet (New) – The Next Big Thing? The odds are against it since consumer goods tend to evolve into single-purpose appliances.
9. REST (New) – Representational State transfer is slowly climbing its way up the list.
10. Web X.0 (5) — Formerly Web 2.0, 3.0, etc.

The study was released in conjunction with Austin's South by Southwest Interactive festival.

On March 17, 2010, the Global Language Monitor presented the Most Confusing High Tech Buzzwords of the first decade of the 21st century (2000–2009).^[17]

1. HTTP — HyperText Transfer Protocol is used for HTML (HyperText Markup Language) files.
2. Flash — As in Flash Memory. "Flash’ is easier to say than " I brought the report on my EEPROM chip with a thin oxide layer separating a floating gate and control gate utilizing Fowler-Nordheim electron tunneling".
3. God Particle – The Higgs boson, thought to account for mass. The God Particle has eluded discovery since its existence was first postulated some thirty years ago.
4. Cloud computing – Distributing or accessing programs and services across the Internet. (The Internet is represented as a cloud.)
5. Plasma (as in plasma TV) — Refers to a kind of television screen technology that uses matrix of gas plasma cells, which are charged by differing electrical voltages to create an image.
6. IPOD – Apple maintains that the idea of the iPod was from the film 2001: A Space Odyssey.
7. Megapixel – One million pixels or picture elements.
8. Nano – Widely used to describe anything small as in nanotechnology. Like the word ‘mini’ which originally referred to the red hues in Italian miniature paintings, the word nano- is ultimately derived from the ancient Greek word for ‘dwarf’.
9. Resonate – Not the tendency of a system to oscillate at maximum amplitude, but the ability to relate to (or resonate with) a customer’s desires.
10. Virtualization – Around since the late ‘70s, virtualization now applies to everything from infrastructures to I/O.

On November 19, 2008 Global Language Monitor announced the most confusing yet frequently cited high tech buzzwords of 2008 to be cloud computing, green washing, and buzzword compliant followed by resonate, de-duping, and virtualization. Rounding out the Top Ten were Web 2.0, versioning, word clouds, and petaflop. The most confusing Acronym for 2008 was SaaS (software as a service).

On 14 October 2007 GLM released a list of the most confusing high tech terms and buzzwords. The words included: iPod, flash, cookie, nano and kernel, followed by megahertz, cell (as in cell phone), plasma, de-duplication and Blu-Ray. Other terms being tracked included terabyte, memory, core, and head crash. The most confusing acronym was found to be SOA, for service-oriented architecture, an acronym which IBM published a book about.^[18]

The studies were released each year on the anniversary of the cookie, the invention that made the World Wide Web practical for widespread surfing, communication, and e-commerce.^[19]

Counting English words

GLM announced the 1,000,000th English word on June 10, 2009.^[20] This controversial exercise was widely covered in the global media.^[21][22] The count itself was widely criticized by a number of prominent members of the linguistic community, including Geoffrey Nunberg,^[23] and Jesse Sheidlower^[24] and Benjamin Zimmer.^[25] on the grounds that since there is no generally accepted definition of a word, there can never be a definitive count.^[24][25][26]

The finalists, which met the criteria of a minimum of 25,000 citations with the necessary breadth of geographic distribution and depth of citations, were:

1. Web 2.0. 2. Jai Ho! 3. N00b. 4. Slumdog. 5. Cloud computing. 6. Carbon Neutral. 7. Slow Food. 8. Octomom. 9. Greenwashing. 10. Sexting. 11. Shovel ready. 12. Defriend. 13. Chengguan. 14. Recessionista. 15. Zombie Banks.^[27]

Critics noted that the target date had been changed a number of times from late in 2006 to early in 2009.^{[28][29][30][31][32][33]} It was also criticized on grounds that a count is impossible because "word" is not a scientifically valid concept. Google addressed this situation by counting the words in the 15 million scanned texts in their corpus.^[34] Global Language Monitor states the general criteria for inclusion on its site, maintaining that it is simply updating the established criteria for printed dictionaries beginning with the works of Samuel Johnson and Noah Webster.^[35]

The New York Times quoted Paul JJ Payack as saying that the PQI is "an algorithm that tracks words and phrases in the media and on the Internet in relation to frequency, context and appearance in global media. It is a weighted index that takes into account year-to-year increases and acceleration in the last several months".^[36] In general terms, GLM describes its Predictive Quantities Indicator (PQI), used to run its analytics on global language trends and, as a weighted index, factoring in long-term trends, short-term changes, momentum and velocity, using frequency data on words and phrases in the global print and electronic media, on the Internet, and throughout the blogosphere, as well as in proprietary databases (Factiva, Lexis-Nexis, etc.). It can also create "signals" that can be used in a variety of applications.^[37]

Obama an English language word

On 20 February 2008 GLM announced that the latest word to enter the English language was "obama", derived from Barack Obama, in its many variations. GLM described Obama- as a "root" for words including obamanomics, obamican, obamamentum, obamacize, obamarama, obamaNation, Obamafy, obamamania and obamacam.^[38] GLM announced it to be an accepted word, once it met the group's published criteria: a minimum of 25,000 citations in the global media, as well as achieving the necessary 'breadth' and 'depth' of citations.^[39]

Top US Colleges and University Rankings

The Global Language Monitor publishes other lists relating to the English language including: the TrendTopper MediaBuzz College Guide rankings of the top 425 U.S. colleges and universities according to their internet brand equity.^[40]

Top Universities (January 2016): Rank/University/Previous Ranking

Top Universities Last

1. Massachusetts Institute of Technology 1
2. University of California at Los Angeles 6
3. University of California, Berkeley 3
4. University of California, Davis 7
5. University of California, San Diego 12
6. University of Chicago 4
7. University of Texas, Austin 5
8. Harvard University 2
9. University of Washington 13
10. University of Southern California 27
11. Stanford University 8
12. University of Wisconsin, Madison 15
13. Yale University 21
14. University of Michigan, Ann Arbor 16
15. University of California, Irvine 37
16. University of Virginia 19
17. University of California, Santa Barbara 36
18. University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill 20
19. University of Minnesota 22
20. Ohio State University, Columbus 28
21. Columbia University 14
22. Princeton University 17
23. University of Pennsylvania 11
24. Duke University 61
25. University of California, Santa Cruz 84
26. New York University 9
27. Emory University 33
28. Michigan State University 24
29. Cornell University 23
30. Johns Hopkins University 30
31. Northwestern University 10
32. University of Florida 67
33. Florida State 48
34. University of Missouri, Columbia 51
35. Virginia Tech 65
36. University of Arizona 77
37. University of Iowa 44
38. Georgia Institute of Technology 26
39. Washington University in St. Louis 25
40. Indiana University, Bloomington 32
41. University of Miami 46
42. Washington State University 79
43. University of Pittsburgh 45
44. University of San Diego 149
45. University of Oregon 49
46. American University 58
47. University of Phoenix 98
48. Purdue University 31
49. Iowa State University 47
50. University of Georgia 43
51. University of Tennessee 90

References

External links

• Official Site