The Language of Fairy Tales

Once upon a time in a land far, far away… is how most people expect fairy tales to start. But according to Chemnitz University of Technology’s Professor Christina Sanchez-Stockhammer, only six out of 200 fairy tales start with that set of words. Though these fairy tales are often credited to the Brothers Grimm, Professor Sanchez-Stockhammer explains that these fairy tales that we know today are actually written accounts as provided by common people at the time, and many from women in particular.

Using corpus linguistic methods, Professor Sanchez-Stockhammer and her team were able to analyse sets of words in English translations of the Brothers Grimm, and look at how often certain patterns emerged. In the example of ‘once upon a time,’ this methodology allows researchers to figure out how this particular string of words became known as the quintessential fairy tale beginning. It’s not just the first line of fairy tales that the studies are looking at either, but the last lines as well.

As Professor of English and Digital Linguistics, Professor Sanchez-Stockhammer’s work focuses primarily on English translations of texts, though in the future she hopes to expand to other languages, to see how the translations compare.

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