Livescience has come up with an interesting entry on language:

Sermons are full of “good times” and tabloids aren’t all that “trashy.”
Or so say the results spit out by VIEW, a language program that can calculate how often and in what combinations words appear in a variety of English languagecategories.
… The project was born as a tool to help those learning English get a handle on nuances of the language. Understanding the most frequent words and how they’re used colloquially is an important part of the process …

Oddly enough, though the study is based at an American Uni, it is specific to Brit English at the moment.