In this project we present an exploratory analysis of the Google books corpus over English, French, Spanish and German. The aim of this work is to model and quantify linguistic drift using word resilience and kernel distance. We also look at word birth and death rates and resilience spectra. Our results indicate that the studied languages have slowed down in more recent years and, with the exception of important events like the world wars, they follow the same evolution model.
Please see the attached report for full info (large PDF with high resolution images).