Vārdu biežums kā kultūrsemantikas indikators: Latvju mēnešraksts, 1942. gada 1. numurs

The article examines the functions of culture-specific vocabulary in Latvian cultural discourse by applying digital humanities methods and a distant-reading approach. The theoretical framework is grounded in Wierzbicka’s cultural-semantic methodology, which treats cultural “key words” as carriers of collective experience, values, and worldviews. For the empirical component, a full-text corpus of the first issue (1942) of the literary and cultural journal Latvju Mēnešraksts was compiled in the SketchEngine environment (≈14,500 word tokens; ≈3,900 unique word types). The results demonstrate that the journal’s discourse is dominated by lexicon associated with Latvian traditional worldview, national identity, and a sense of belonging: concepts such as darbs ‘work’, dzīve ‘life’, laiks ‘time’, cilvēks ‘person’, and especially Blaumanis as a key cultural-canon figure. Spatial and belonging-related concepts (e.g., zeme ‘land’, vieta ‘place’, māja ‘home’) form a central semantic field within the journal, reflecting the culturally significant Latvian attachment to environment, homeland, and community. Equally important is the cultural-semantic role of the concept saule ‘sun’, expressed through folkloric connotations and the Latvian mythopoetic worldview. The word dziesma ‘song’ is identified as a culture-specific element whose meaning strongly correlates with the folk-song tradition, layers of collective memory, and the Song Festival phenomenon. The analysis of ethnonyms and nationality-related lexicon indicates an ideologically cautious approach within the journal.