Check out this awesome linguistic analysis of A Song of Ice and Fire

You guys, this is so cool. This is so cool, you guys.

Alright, this may only be cool if you’re a language nerd, but I’ll let you all decide for yourself. Blogger Dimitris Spathis has created a wonderfully detailed linguistic analysis of several of the most popular book series of the past 60 years, including The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, The Hunger Games, and A Song of Ice and Fire. He breaks down what kinds phrases the authors commonly use, their top choices when it comes to nouns and verbs, and how easy their prose is to read. Spathis’ intention was to see if incredibly successful authors use language in similar ways, but I think it’s more interesting to see how these authors differed when it comes to their prose.

And yes, Spathis labels the Song of Ice and Fire books as the Game of Thrones series. Like it or not, most of the general public knows Martins novels as “the Game of Thrones books,” which is reflected here.

First up, a look at the phrases the various authors use when writing, conveniently arranged in word clouds.

Notice how J.R.R. Tolkien (The Lord of the Rings) and George R.R. Martin (A Song of Ice and Fire, duh) favor plot-centric phrases (“the ring,” “the wall”) whereas J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter) and Suzanne Collins (The Hunger Games) use more general phrases more often. Does this mean that Tolkien and Martin tell more focused stories than Rowling and Collins, or that they’re preoccupied with plot over character? I don’t know, but if someone wanted to write a graduate thesis on the question, that would be great.

Spathis created separate charts to track the most common nouns, verbs, adverbs, and adjectives used in the four series, but the adverb chart is the most interesting, especially as it relates to A Song of Ice and Fire.

What does this chart tell us? That George R.R. Martin hates adverbs. As Spathis notes, adverbs are sometimes considered a crutch among professional writers (Stephen King has said that “[T]hey seem to have been created with the timid writer in mind”), so we can take Martin’s apparent distaste for them as an endorsement of his writing ability.

Finally, look at this analysis of each series’ Automated Readability Index (ARI). Basically, ARI measures how easy a book is to read. The results may surprise you.

We think of the Song of Ice and Fire books as complex, but according to Spathis’ analysis, they’re far easier to read than the books in the Harry Potter series. According to the ARI measurements (see Spathis’ post for the calculations), you only need to be 10 years old to understand A Song of Ice and Fire, but 15 years old to understand Harry Potter.

If that seems counterintuitive (and it does, considering that millions of children read the Harry Potter books before reaching the age of 15), there are other ways of looking at the data. For example, just because Martin’s language is easy to understand doesn’t mean that the story he’s telling isn’t dense and layered.

Anyway, this is all delightful. To see the rest of Spathis’ analysis, head over to his blog.

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