Between the two neighboring countries Sweden and Norway there has always been some kind of sibling like competition over which nation is the greatest. The smaller Norway with all its wealth, oil and alliances compared to the slightly larger Sweden with its socialism, IKEA and half hearted pacifism.

Fortunately there is someone relatively independent that keeps track of how much these two tiny nations stir the world pond. From all the books that Google have been digitalizing their lab have come up with Google Ngram Viewer, which basically have counted all the occurrences of every words in all their digitalized books for the last two centuries. A lot of interesting unproven conclusions can be drawn from such data by the creative mind.

The historical competition between Sweden and Norway can bee evaluated with this and the results show that size does matter. The only exception is the years of the second world war where the factor of how conquered you were clearly shows in the statistics.

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