Language, Power and Imperial Administration: Tracing Linguistic Change through Colonial Records and Public Institutions

Abstract

Language played a fundamental role in the operation of colonial governance by shaping administrative communication, institutional authority, and documentary practices. This study examined linguistic patterns in colonial-era texts to investigate the relationship between language, imperial administration, and public institutions. A historical corpus-based research design was employed using metadata from the Project Gutenberg collection. Following systematic screening, metadata cleaning, publication-year verification, and full-text retrieval, a corpus of 25 colonial texts comprising approximately 2.17 million words was constructed. The texts were analysed using computational linguistic techniques, including lexical preprocessing, dictionary-based vocabulary classification, TF-IDF analysis, descriptive statistics, and non-parametric tests. The findings revealed consistent patterns of administrative, legal, educational, and institutional vocabulary across the analysed corpus. Institutional categories exhibited distinct linguistic profiles, reflecting their respective administrative functions, while statistical analysis indicated no significant temporal variation in the Administrative Language Index across historical periods. The results suggest that colonial administrations relied on standardized linguistic conventions that supported bureaucratic continuity and institutional governance. By integrating archival screening with corpus linguistics, the study demonstrates the value of computational approaches for examining historical documentary collections. The proposed methodological framework contributes to historical linguistics and colonial studies by providing a transparent approach for analysing administrative language and offers a foundation for future investigations using larger and more diverse archival corpora.