Clustering Ideological Terms in Historical Newspaper Data with Diachronic Word Embeddings

During the course of the nineteenth century, ideological language mostly expressed through isms such as liberalism, socialism or conservatism, entered the lexicon in most European languages. Previous research has based on reading key texts claimed that the suffix ism was introduced to new linguistic domains during the period up to WWI, many of which do not relate to ideology. This paper uses a data-driven way to study the emergence of isms in nineteenth-century Finnish newspapers and uses word embeddings to cluster them and to trace their thematic expansion in the period. As such, the study provides a quantitatively sound way of tracking how isms relate to ideological language and more generally contributes to the understanding of the development of political language in Finland.