Said another way, present tense suggests that speakers don’t just have an opinion, they are relatively certain about it.

The more emotional language an article used, the more likely audiences were to keep reading.

Linguistic similarity even helped distinguish between employees who stayed at the firm and those who left to pursue better options. Not because they got fired, but because they were offered something better elsewhere. These folks assimilated early on, but at some point, their language started to diverge. While clearly capable of adapting, eventually they stopped trying, foreshadowing their intention to quit.

... language is like a fingerprint. It leaves behind traces or signals of the person or people who created it.

Because beyond telling us things about specific people, language also reveals things about society more broadly. The biases and beliefs that shape how we see the world.