{"id":17471,"date":"2011-10-17T11:00:39","date_gmt":"2011-10-17T16:00:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/?p=17471"},"modified":"2011-10-17T10:42:22","modified_gmt":"2011-10-17T15:42:22","slug":"is-the-mormon-moment-larger-outside-the-u-s","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/2011\/10\/is-the-mormon-moment-larger-outside-the-u-s\/","title":{"rendered":"Is the ‘Mormon Moment’ larger outside the U.S.?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"DieMormonen\"I’ve been looking at Google’s ngram viewer<\/a> this weekend, at the instigation of my fellow blogger, Wilfried Decoo<\/a>, and what I came across implies that the “Mormon Moment,” starting in this case with Mitt Romney’s first run for the presidency, may have had a larger impact in places outside of the U.S. than it has had in the U.S.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

There are, of course, limitations in the Google Books data that the ngram viewer uses. It specifically excludes periodicals, for example, which are generally more topical and quicker to react to recent events. What the ngram viewer does include is a way to look at the content of books by language (for French, German, Spanish, Hebrew, Russian and Chineese (simplified)). And it turns out that in several languages there has been a recent uptick in how frequently the terms Mormon<\/em> and Latter-day Saints<\/em> (or the equivalent in each language) appear in books that year in each language.<\/p>\n

In contrast, the change doesn’t occur overall in English. Here is the graphs for Mormon<\/em> and for Latter-day Saints<\/em> since 1950:<\/p>\n

\"Mormon-1950-En\" \"LDS-En\"I put these on two separate graphs because the use of the term Mormon<\/em> dwarfs that of Latter-day Saints<\/em> by a factor of 25,000!! (It seems like only Mormons use the term Latter-day Saints<\/em>.) The spike about 1980 in how often Latter-day Saints appears seems to be due to the Priesthood Revelation and to the Church’s Sesquicentennial celebrations.<\/p>\n

.<\/p>\n

.<\/p>\n

.<\/p>\n

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However, even if we stay in English and just look at British sources, there is a significant recent uptick in how often Mormon<\/em> appears in print:<\/p>\n

\"Mormon-1950-BrEn\"I didn’t include the graph of how frequently the term Latter-day Saints<\/em> appears because the ngram viewer doesn’t give any useful results — apparently it appears too infrequently in British sources for the graph to be useful.<\/p>\n

.<\/p>\n

When we switch to other languages, the data becomes even more apparent. Here are the graphs for German:<\/p>\n

\"Mormon-1950-De\" \"HLT-De\"I’m not sure why the Latter-day Saints <\/em>equivalent (Heiligen der Letzten Tage<\/em>) shows a big uptick around 2000, but I should point out that even in German the use of Mormon<\/em> out weighs the use of Heiligen der Letzten Tage<\/em>, although not as substantially as in English.<\/p>\n

.<\/p>\n

.<\/p>\n

.<\/p>\n

.<\/p>\n

.<\/p>\n

Spanish also demonstrates this trend, although, not quite as clearly as with German:<\/p>\n

\"SUD-Mormon-Es\"This time it worked well enough that I could put the data on a single graph. Unlike German, in Spanish the use of the terms Mormon<\/em> and Santos de los \u00daltimos D\u00edas<\/em> has been trending up for the past several decades, probably reflecting the growth of the Church among Spanish-speakers. Still, it seems clear that the last few years do show a striking increase. Also interesting is that the term Mormon<\/em> is used less<\/strong> frequently than Santos de los \u00daltimos D\u00edas<\/em>! (Sorry, I have no idea why.)<\/p>\n

However, not every language shows this trend. French, for example, shows no difference:<\/p>\n

\"SDJ-Mormon-Fr\"Again it works to include both terms on the same graph. FWIW, the high point in 1950 appears related to the publication of Quand Dieu se fit Americain<\/em> (When God Became American) by well-known French writer Marc Chardonne. I’m afraid I really don’t have any explanation of why the data didn’t reflect an upturn in mentions of Mormons like those shown in other languages, other than cultural stereotypes of the French (which I’ll avoid).<\/p>\n

To round out the information available, I also did not see the same trend in the other languages available. In Russian there was a peak in 2002-2003, and an upturn since 2005 looks like it follows the trend of the past decade or so. Hebrew, in general, shows a decline over the past decade or more, and Chinese doesn’t have enough data for the viewer to give results.<\/p>\n

All told, I don’t think we can definitively claim that there is a recent surge in mentioning the Church at this point, because there are problems with the information. The viewer cuts off data after 2008, so if the ‘Mormon Moment’ is the source of what the graphs show, Romney’s first electoral attempt seems like the likely source of the interest. But it is also possible that the local Church presence in these languages could have an effect also. I think we would also see a much larger change if we could get data from periodicals\u2014but to my knowledge, there isn’t a way to do a similar calculation for periodicals because a near universal database like Google Books doesn’t exist.<\/p>\n

I must also admit that I didn’t take the time to dive into the data behind these graphs, so I can’t describe how the books in these languages are using these terms. Are they books about politics and recent news? Or are they anti-Mormon tracts? Or are they just translations from English of things like Krakauer? If anyone decides to dive behind these numbers and look at what the mentions of Mormons are, I’d love to hear your comments and reactions.<\/p>\n

Is the ‘Mormon Moment’ bigger outside the U.S.? I can’t say for sure. But the above graphs make you wonder whether or not that might be the case.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve been looking at Google’s ngram viewer this weekend, at the instigation of my fellow blogger, Wilfried Decoo, and what I came across implies that the “Mormon Moment,” starting in this case with Mitt Romney’s first run for the presidency, may have had a larger impact in places outside of the U.S. than it has had in the U.S.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":111,"featured_media":17473,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[53,55],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17471","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-latter-day-saint-thought","category-news-politics"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/10\/Mormon-1950-En.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17471","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/111"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17471"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17471\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17490,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17471\/revisions\/17490"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17473"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17471"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17471"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17471"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}