Overview
- A Cardiff University-led team reported in Brain Sciences that computational analysis of 33 Discworld novels tracked language shifts over more than three decades.
- The authors found a statistically significant, gradual drop in lexical diversity—especially in adjectives and nouns—across later books.
- The first marked decline appeared in The Last Continent, nearly ten years before Pratchett’s 2007 diagnosis of posterior cortical atrophy.
- Readers would be unlikely to notice the change, as later novels grew longer, but vocabulary drew from a narrower range.
- The researchers stress the method is not a diagnostic, note privacy and individual differences, and propose it as a complement to tests and biomarkers.