A Diachronic Study on British and Chinese Cultural Complexity with Google Books Ngrams

The present study examined British and Chinese cultural complexity from the 1900 to 2000 with Shannon's entropy. The British and Chinese bigrams parts of the Google Books Ngrams Corpus were used as the data. The findings indicated that, similar to American cultural complexity both British and Chinese cultural complexity show a general increasing trend during the past century. However, the cultural complexity in either Britain or China does not rise steadily. In addition, significant differences were found between American, British, and Chinese cultural complexities. Several issues concerned are discussed and suggestions for future research are made.