A Distributional Semantic Analysis of Political Terminology in Eastern European Languages

Drawing on Quentin Skinner's methodological assertions and the respective Cambridge School of political thought, this study is an attempt to apply computational methods to analyze the semantic drift of political terminologies in languages spoken in the post-socialist bloc following its collapse. Using common crawl fastText embeddings across a select number of languages, we project select political terminologies onto analytically defined axes, employ an Orthogonal Procrustes Analysis to align these vector spaces, and measure the Euclidean distance of said terminologies. I identify statistically significant non-isometric variation across the region, demonstrating that cognate terms no longer perform similar semantic functions. This report validates the methodological framework for a forthcoming 50-year longitudinal study (1975–2025) aimed at outlining the dissolution (or lack thereof) of semantics in post-socialist Eastern Europe.