I was sitting in Telegram (a social network) looking through channels with free giveaways of games, contests, coupons, and scholarships for free study when suddenly an idea came to me. As a Russian-speaking person, I know such a word as "халява (halyava)", which is another form of the word free and means easily achievable and obtained. After all, in our mentality, it is the norm to get things for free, and for most, it is not normal to pay for what you can get for free. However, how are things in other parts of the world? I turned to the Internet with this question, but my search was not successful. There were only the same ideas that I voiced above. I went the other way and wanted to determine how non-Russian-speaking people use the word "FREE".
The method that was used is Google trends. I translated the word "FREE" into the most common languages and made an analysis of what phrases and for what purposes they are used at the moment on the Internet. I also made statistics on how often this word has been used over the past 15 years.
In Russian, people are looking for opportunities to watch and download movies, music, and other things, while for English speakers this was relevant more than 10 years ago. Now second ones are looking for information about the free covid test and the word "gluten-free". This is due to the fact that it is customary for English speakers to buy products, pay for subscriptions, and so on.
Owners of the Chinese language are not interested not only in the word for free but also in Google in general, compared to 2005. They have their own private network, so it is difficult to find out what the word free means to them.
The strangest thing for me was the results of the Hindi language. The only thing they are interested in is a free university and the word "sexy". Perhaps they have their own local history that is alien to us and we will not understand the meaning of what they are looking for.
From all of the above, I have drawn several conclusions. My search has not been quite successful, and it requires a deeper investigation. However, even if at this stage I did not know what "FREE" means for some speakers of other languages, I was able to establish a connection between simple statistics and the moment when the use of the Internet became a turning point for countries. For example, the highest point of the word free for English was 2004, while for Russian it is 2009. Thus, it can be understood that the mass use of the Internet in these countries began at this time. Another example is when China began to control the Internet and information inside the country.
Thus, I achieved unexpected results and came to the conclusion that the desires, needs, and mentality of people in relation to the Internet are formed on the country in which they live, the availability of the Internet, and the state of affairs in their society.
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