Look Who’s Talking: The Most Frequently Used Words in the Bulgarian Parliament 1990-2024

Paper i proceeding, 2024

In this study we identify the most frequently used words and some multi-word expressions in the Bulgarian Parliament. We do this by using the transcripts of all plenary sessions between 1990 and 2024 - 3,936 in total. This allows us both to study an interesting period known in the Bulgarian linguistic space as the years of “transition and democracy”, and to provide scholars of Bulgarian politics with a purposefully generated list of additional stop words that they can use for future analysis. Because our list of words was generated from the data, there is no preconceived theory, and because we include all interactions during all sessions, our analysis goes beyond traditional party lines. We provide details of how we selected, retrieved, and cleaned our data, and discuss our findings.