Studying the Historical Semantics of Finnishness with a Bigram Approach

Our paper analyzes the historical understanding of Finland and Finnishness as it was expressed in newspapers published in the late eighteenth century and the early nineteenth century. As the period saw the decimation of the Swedish Kingdom and establishment of the Grand Duchy of Finland within the Russian Empire, a change in language use can be expected, but the changes occurring are rather fine-grained and difficult to detect without a systematic and transparent charting of the data. This paper suggests a method based on the analysis of bigrams to study this type of semantic change. Many existing methods are designed to navigate massive amounts of linguistic data and do well in solving computational tasks, but are not always a good match for the kind of historiographical questions such as ours. More broadly, we establish that the application of Finnish can in principle refer to the categories of language, geography, nationhood, statehood, and territoriality. Our analysis shows that especially the categories of language and state underwent a gradual shift in the period from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century.Peer reviewe