A Computational Approach to Identifying Cultural Keywords across Languages

Abstract

Distinctive aspects of a culture are often reflected in the meaning and usage of words in the language spoken by bearers of that culture. Keywords such as душа (soul) in Russian and gezellig (convivial/cosy/fun) in Dutch are held to be especially culturally revealing, and scholars have identified a number of such keywords using careful lin- guistic analyses (Wierzbicka, 1990; Peeters, 2020b). Because keywords are expected to have different statistical properties than related words in other languages, we argue that quantitative comparison of word usage across languages can help to identify cultural keywords. To support this claim we describe a computational method that compares word frequencies across languages, and apply it to both linguistic corpora and word association data. The method identifies culturally-specific words that range from “obvi- ous” examples such as Amsterdam in Dutch to non-obvious yet independently proposed examples such as душа (soul) in Russian. We show in addition that linguistic corpora and word association data provide converging evidence about culturally-specific words. Our results therefore show how computational analyses and behavioral experiments can supplement the methods previously used by linguists to identify culturally salient words across languages.