Despite the expression, I had a lot of fun today presenting our research with Stefano Ondelli on populist language. 
Stefano's a linguistics professor and, for years, we've been talking about doing something together on populist language. But the catalyst was stories like this about Trump's supposedly simple language:
The Trump stories were easily believable to populist scholars because for decades we've been writing in our introductions that populists communicate in simple language.
But do they? Actually, we don't know. There have been few empirical studies done and those that exist have a series of flaws. For example, one that has been cited a lot on Trump is based entirely on his announcement speech, i.e. a text that is under 7000 words (hint: not enough).
So...we constructed a corpus of populist leaders' speeches in the US, UK, France and Italy and compared them to mainstream leaders' speeches in the same countries, all over the same time periods in each country.
In total, we gathered 100,000 words for every leader, hence in total a 1 million word dataset of speeches, in order to answer the following question:
We analysed them using the following methods which linguists have been using for many decades to assess simplicity of language.
I won't bore you with all the findings, but here's a few. Remember the claim that Trump spoke in much simpler ways than other candidates? Not so. Here's the grade level for him (left) and Clinton (right). Yes, he's simpler, but not by so much.
As for France, Le Pen is much less simple on ALL measures (readability, lexical richness, lexical density and complex words) than Macron. Here's the readability measure.
Same story in the UK. Farage is much less simple than Cameron and he's a full 4 grades above Miliband! In large part, this is due to the fact that his sentences are far longer.
The only case that largely met our expectations was Italy, where Salvini was (mostly, but not entirely) simpler than Renzi and Alfano.
But, even then, it was mixed (for example, Salvini used more 'uncommon' words than the others. As, incidentally, did Trump compared to Clinton). So, what do we conclude?
Right-wing populists do not necessarily speak in linguistically simpler ways than mainstream politicians. In two cases (UK & France), they certainly do not. So, in short, 40 years of en passant claims of "populists use simple language" are wrong.
And, if you want to find the distinguishing features of populist language, you probably need to look at content rather than simplicity. We do that in the second part of this project, and the initial results are already fascinating, but that's for another day. End/Fine/Fin
