Comment by ActorNightly
21 hours ago
> Americans are speaking to one another far less than they used to. According to that study, the number of spoken words uttered by the average person fell by 28% between 2005 and 2019. Each year during that time period, the number of words people spoke in an average day declined.
I wonder what the difference is between this, and culture in EU where small talk isn't really a thing.
The EU is large and most importantly very diverse. Pretty much all the West and South of Europe has a very strong small talk culture. You shall not stereotype a country, and even less so a political and economical union of countries.
The US is larger than Europe and importantly very diverse, a melting pot you could say. You will find people in the South are far more talkative than people in the Northwest. The “Seattle Freeze” is real and I believe that it does not exist to the same extent in the South.
Just pop over the border to Canada from Washington state and they thaw right out!
Also, nit, but Europe has ~2x the population of the States, and definitely more cultural and linguistic diversity.
They all talk or at least understand English. The cultural exchange between Spain and Hungary is much smaller. Or France and Poland. And historical shaping is much different - they did not went through the same dictatorships and same wars.
And within those regions it differs a lot too. Here in a big Spanish city you would find very little too, especially in summer when there's so many tourists.