Hello readers,
I am Nostalpouet. I am a fellow Crypto enthusiast and I have a background in language studies!
Today, I will propose an introductory linguistic analysis of Bitcoin! This analysis will be powered by a free database: https://www.english-corpora.org/now/.
In this database, called the News on the Web corpus, you can search for word occurrences and associations in a database of billions of words. The data is extracted from newspapers on the web. They provide an interesting view of the evolution of language through statistical analysis of occurrences but also sentiment associated with certain words.
When searching for collocates, or words most often associated with the word you selected, you can choose the range. If you choose and +4 -4 range, the searching tool will gather all the words occurring near the word you selected and rank them.
For example if I search Crypto with a +4/ -4 range I can see that the 96th word most occurring near Crypto is Scams.
Today I will present to you a lot of data about Bitcoin and language. All the data is powered from the NOW database so it will tell us how the news is presenting Bitcoin to the masses.
The first information useful to understand the long term trend of Bitcoin and it’s adoption is the frequency of the word. Of course, the corpus doesn’t have all the occurrences of Bitcoin in the media, but it can outline growth or decline in the usage of a term. Here is the yearly data for Bitcoin:
As you can see it is currently in its best year ever! With more than a third of its total occurrences happening this year, Bitcoin, as a word, is currently rising a lot. This is pushing visibility which in turns pushes adoption, yet it is important to nuance, since there are now Crypto specialized outlets in the corpus, some of this growth may not affect the general public. Now I already hear the complaints: “Bitcoin was heavily mentioned only because of the crash but I’m sure the rest of the year wasn’t making headlines”. Thanks to the NOW corpus we can verify this just by clicking on the 2021 link in the table. Here is a monthly chart for the current year:
You can definitely see a rise in June but the growth wasn’t due to the crash and is organic. We’ll need next year data to see if it is sustained but even a stagnation for 2 or 3 years would be a good sign as Bitcoin is mentioned more than 70 times/Million words.
Of course If you have the time, you could theoretically try to analyze every article to get a better representation on how is presented the news to the public. For example, if you click on the blue column for 2021, you go to this screen:
In this screen you can explore different snippets from articles mentioning Bitcoin. Let’s take one at random an article from March:
We can appreciate how this article, for example, is propagating FUD. Now you don’t want to be searching every article title and context to know the sentiment about Bitcoin. I have good news for you! You don’t need to !
The next feature we are going to use is the collocates search engine. So now we can play a game together! A kind of Family Feud ! What is according to you, the 10 words that were most often found just after Bitcoin in 2021? 
We can appreciate how ‘Bitcoin Mining’ is the most used combination. It should also be noted that Bitcoin Cash is in 3rd place because it is another cryptocurrency. We can also find out the 10 words found most often behind Bitcoin:
We can see from this data that there was huge news of adoption: Accept Bitcoin, Accepting Bitcoin, and Using Bitcoin, are all in the top 10. Now why not take a closer look into the top 10 words appearing at range of 4 words behind or 4 words in front of mentions of Bitcoin.
We can all appreciate how the news seems to speak more about Buying and Trading Bitcoin than ‘Risks’ or ‘Crash’. In fact the first appearance of something which can be considered as not good is ‘Volatility’ Ranked 31st. ‘Halving’ Ranked 41st is also not so good. Bull is in front of Bear as Bull is 53rd while Bear doesn’t appear in the charts.
We often have the feeling that the News Media is reporting far more bad news about Crypto than good news. This seems to not be true for 2021. I don’t know how the emergence of specialized outlets have changed the data but we can hope that traditional media is also following this trend. This post was more about presenting data than analysis but I think this data is valuable to any fellow crypto-enthusiasts.
I hope you learned a thing or two about Bitcoin and its linguistic data. Thank you for reading my first article and see you soon for more tidbits about Cryptocurrencies, Medias and Linguistics!
