The study took the 16 European languages that had been chosen and observed them under three different metrics: the diversity of words in the dictionary of each language per category, the number of tweets per topic in each language and the number of Google searches per topic in each.

With 277 synonyms for love and being one of the countries who tweets and searches about love the most, Portugal is the clear language of love in Europe. Portuguese is also the language of family, with the two categories being tangentially correlated, as well as the language of art, a title backed up by many great poets from the country’s history.

The runner-up to the topic of love is surprisingly enough not a Latin country. The 2nd language of love is, in fact, German, who actually offer more synonyms for love than Portugal, at a whopping 289.

In third place, beating out the popularly passionate Italian language, is English. English-speakers are only the 9th most likely to search love on Google, but if you look at Twitter, they’re the ones talking most about the topic. The English dictionary is also home to the 3rd largest collection of ways to express love in written word.

The remaining Romance languages fill out the rest of the top 8, but not without Dutch sneaking into 5th place, the low country’s language also coming out on top in the topic of work. French follows in the love rankings in 6th, then Spanish and Romanian. The bottom three in the last of 16 consist of the Finnish, Swedish and Hungarian languages, in descending order.

Author

Star in the 2015 music video for the hit single “Headlights” by German musician, DJ and record producer Robin Schulz featuring American singer-songwriter Ilsey. Also a journalist.

Jay Bodsworth