Comforting Words: People who talk alike are drawn to each other

VIENNA, Italy - Footpath or sidewalk. Aluminum or aluminium. Gasoline or petrol, z or s when spelling words such as recognise/recognize.

For people who grow up speaking less widely-used or standardised - sorry, standardized - variants, such as Australian or Irish, those minor differences mean switching between UK and US English is not usually a big deal.

But to many Americans and British, some differences - such as saying "holiday" or "vacation" - can feel as vast as the Atlantic Ocean that separates them.

According to linguists at the University of Vienna, people tend to see each other as "part of the same social group" if they use the same words and phrases, even when it comes to choosing between synonyms such as "start" or "begin."

"Our study participants chose conversation partners who spoke similarly to them and used the same grammatical construction as them," said the Austrian university’s Theresa Matzinger, whose team’s findings were published in the journal Language and Cognition.

"Linguistic similarity promotes cooperative tendencies in humans," the team found, an outcome that could could lead to a "better understanding of decision-making in groups, such as stakeholder decisions in diverse linguistic settings."

UK-based linguists recently published research warning of growing conformism in conversations, with people shown to be increasingly-inclined to mimic each other by echoing jargon and slogans they hear and read in corporate communications and on social media. - DPA