As families gather for the holiday season, many people hope that one particular subject won’t come up at the dinner table: politics. The truth is, it’s a hot topic. Popular podcasters like Logan Paul and Alex Cooper can’t avoid the subject. Some podcasters, of course, thrive on politics—and the heated debate surrounding it.
Whether or not a podcast talks about politics, politics apparently influence how podcasters talk. Preply analyzed transcripts from some of the most popular personality-based podcasts in America to identify their language to draw in listeners. As it turns out, liberal and conservative podcast hosts tend to use distinctly different groups of words. Below are some of our key findings.
Top Words Used by Liberal vs. Conservative Hosts
With the divisive state of American politics these days, it sometimes seems that the two sides speak two different languages. Our analysis of the most popular words used by podcasters suggests that this is true in some ways.
In fact, not a single word on the liberal top 5 most-used lists appears on the conservative top 5 list. Only two words appear on the top 10 lists on both sides: “states” and “world.” The overwhelming majority of words—like “beautiful” (liberals) and “fact” (conservatives)—appear on one list but not the other.
Conservative Hosts Use More “Political” Language
More than any other word in the English language, conservative podcast hosts use the word “states.” “Money” follows closely behind, and “president” comes in third. “Inflation” and “government” also make the top 10. While “states” shows up in position number 7 for liberal hosts, most other (potentially) political words don’t even crack the top 15.
One interesting aside: both liberals and conservatives often use words that refer to people, but they make different word choices to do so. “Dude” makes fourth place for conservatives, and “folks” comes in sixth. For liberals, “man” is the sixth most popular word.
Conservative Hosts Also Use More Patriotic Words
Patriotic words like “America,” “American,” and “United” (presumably at least sometimes together with “States”) appear among the top 15 most-used words for conservative podcasters. While these may seem like general rather than patriotic/political words, none of these words showed up in the top 15 most used by liberal hosts.
Liberal Hosts Talk More About “Kids” and “Family”
Liberal podcast hosts use the word “family” more than any other, fairly significantly. The related word “kids” came in third place for liberal podcasters, while neither appeared on the conservative list.
Rounding out the top 5 words for liberals was “crazy,” “funny,” and “sorry.” Why? Your guess is as good as ours, but we can tell you that three of the podcasts we analyzed had the word “sorry” in their top 5. Liberal podcasters also seem partial to the words “guess” and “weird,” as both appeared in their top 10.
The Most-Used Words for Specific Podcasts
We also looked at the top 5 most-used words for specific podcasts. Across the board, the most common word was “states.” Four podcasts had the word in their individual top 5 and made the top 10 for both conservative and liberal hosts. Four popular podcasts also had “president” in their top 5, and the word took the fifth spot overall.
Other vocabulary choices reflect the unique speech patterns of their particular podcaster—and perhaps their particular audience. Impulsive with Logan Paul uses “cool,” “bro,” and “yo.” The Ramsey Show likes “awesome,” while The Dan Bongino Show and Office Ladies prefer “gosh.”
Finally, other popular words obviously express the subject being discussed. As you would expect, Crime Junkies often uses “police,” “investigators,” and “case.” On the relationship-oriented podcast, Call Her Daddy, frequently repeated words include “love” and “sexy.”
Setting Your Intentions(Opens in a new browser tab)
Podcasts for the Holidays
While you may still want to steer clear of politics over the holidays, perhaps you can discuss your favorite podcasts with your loved ones. Whatever happens, we won’t judge you if any of these top 10 words come to mind: “crazy,” “family,” “weird,” and “wow.” Just try not to say them aloud—and enjoy the holidays!
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