Spanish is the happiest language in the world! A comprehensive 2015 study by researchers at the University of Vermont and the MITRE Corporation has found that Spanish ranks as the “happiest” of ten major world languages, thanks to a higher concentration of positive words like “amor” (love), “alegría” (joy), and “felicidad” (happiness).
Over 600 million people worldwide speak Spanish, including both native and second-language speakers. Mexico is the first Spanish-speaking country with 132 million speakers, followed by the U.S. (57.4 million), Colombia (52.6 million), Spain (48 million), and Argentina (47 million,-).
Researchers built a hedonometer to demonstrate Spanish is the ‘happiest’ language in the world
The team gathered 100,000 of the most frequently used words in English, Spanish, French, German, Brazilian Portuguese, Korean, Simplified Chinese, Russian, Indonesian, and Arabic. They then asked panels of native speakers, 50 per language, to rate each word’s emotional tone on a nine‑point scale, from very unhappy to very happy.
“Across all ten languages, there was a universal positivity bias,” said lead researcher Peter Dodds of the University of Vermont. “But Spanish speakers consistently rated their language highest in median happiness.” Simplified Chinese scored lowest in the group, though all languages contained more uplifting terms than negative ones, a phenomenon psychologists call the Pollyanna principle.
Using that data, the researchers built a real‑time “hedonometer” to track happiness signals in social media. By analyzing roughly 50 million daily tweets, about one trillion words over six years, they observed that laughter (variants of “hahaha”) ranks among the most common positive expressions in every tongue.
To test whether this positivity bias reflects everyday usage, the team mined diverse text sources, news articles, books, song lyrics, and movie subtitles. They confirmed that Spanish‑language Google Books and Spanish‑language X/Twitter feeds featured the highest proportion of upbeat vocabulary.
The findings suggest that a language’s emotional character emerges from both its lexicon and its speakers’ choices. “If you step back from the negativity of headlines or online flame wars, you see that human language is more positive than negative,” Dodds said.
While it remains unclear whether speaking Spanish can boost one’s mood, experts note that the language’s melodic rhythm and warm cultural associations may amplify its cheerful reputation. In the meantime, those feeling blue might try tuning into a Spanish pop playlist, watching a dubbed comedy, or simply peppering their speech with words like “sonrisa” (smile) and “risa” (laughter).