With their choice of words on Twitter, Americans appear to be living up to their national stereotype as negative and assertive, while Canadians tend to be nice and polite on the microblogging platform, suggests an analysis of nearly 40 million tweets.

Canadians were far more positive on Twitter, using words such as great, thanks, good, amazing, and happy. Americans tended to use more negative words like hate, miss, mad, feel, swear, tired, said the study published online in the journal PLOS ONE. "The Twitter behaviour we observe doesn't actually reflect the real underlying personality profile of an average American or Canadian," said study co-author Daniel Schmidtke from McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada.