Skip to main content

The context you need, when you need it

When news breaks, you need to understand what actually matters — and what to do about it. At Vox, our mission to help you make sense of the world has never been more vital. But we can’t do it on our own.

We rely on readers like you to fund our journalism. Will you support our work and become a Vox Member today?

Join now

Finally! Science proves that Canadians are way more polite than Americans.

Fans in Canadian flag attire follow Graham Delaet of Canada during the first round of the 144th Open Championship at The Old Course on July 16, 2015, in St Andrews, Scotland.
Fans in Canadian flag attire follow Graham Delaet of Canada during the first round of the 144th Open Championship at The Old Course on July 16, 2015, in St Andrews, Scotland.
Fans in Canadian flag attire follow Graham Delaet of Canada during the first round of the 144th Open Championship at The Old Course on July 16, 2015, in St Andrews, Scotland.
Stuart Franklin/Getty Images

It is a generally assumed principle, much like the sun rising in the east or bears hibernating in the winter, that Canadians are an unfailingly polite people. They don’t like to argue; they apologize for mistakes that others make.

We accept that Canadians are exceedingly polite — and now we have some data to prove it. Two doctoral students at McMaster University, a bit outside of Toronto, compared millions of geotagged tweets from the United States and Canada from 2015. They looked at the top 10 percent of words most likely to be used by Canadians and compared them with the top 10 percent most likely to be used by Americans.

They found that Canadians, true to form, are just way nicer on Twitter. This is a word cloud of each country’s most-used words — note that some on the American side had to be blurred out, as they were not appropriate for the university’s website:

The most disproportionately American and Canadian words on Twitter.

The most disproportionately Canadian words on Twitter are things like “amazing,” “great,” and “favourite.” Of course, the word “agree” is on the Canadian side of things, too.

The words way more likely to show up in American tweets — some of which are blurred out in the above image — include “damn,” “hate,” “ass,” and some racial slurs that we will not repeat here.

You can explore the most Canadian and American words here, on a site built by McMaster University’s Daniel Schmidtke and Bryor Snefjella. They’ve also done interesting work comparing word usage in England and Scotland, as a way to understand how the English language changes when it crosses over countries’ borders.

See More:

More in archives

archives
Ethics and Guidelines at Vox.comEthics and Guidelines at Vox.com
archives
By Vox Staff
Supreme Court
The Supreme Court will decide if the government can ban transgender health careThe Supreme Court will decide if the government can ban transgender health care
Supreme Court

Given the Court’s Republican supermajority, this case is unlikely to end well for trans people.

By Ian Millhiser
archives
On the MoneyOn the Money
archives

Learn about saving, spending, investing, and more in a monthly personal finance advice column written by Nicole Dieker.

By Vox Staff
archives
Total solar eclipse passes over USTotal solar eclipse passes over US
archives
By Vox Staff
archives
The 2024 Iowa caucusesThe 2024 Iowa caucuses
archives

The latest news, analysis, and explainers coming out of the GOP Iowa caucuses.

By Vox Staff
archives
The Big SqueezeThe Big Squeeze
archives

The economy’s stacked against us.

By Vox Staff