Weekly words: 2009 review

It's January, a time when it is traditional to review where we've come from and to make resolutions for the future. If you were asked to guess which words distinguished 2009 from previous years, what would be in your top 10? I've avoided the guesswork by identifying the "keywords" for the last year (words that are statistically prominent in 2009 compared with the rest of the Guardian Weekly Archive). So how did you do? It's likely that you guessed the top three keywords for 2009 – they were Obama, recession and climate – a mix of hope and gloom. However, I think that the rest of the list might have been more difficult. In my own research I have identified seven groups of keywords. These range from people (the biggest group) to society. Obama and Brown are at the top of the people list, but less predictably we also find the strangely disparate grouping of Darwin, Ahmadinejad and Cameron in the top five. The environment list is headed by global, climate and change , followed by energy and carbon . Under economy, comes recession, banks, bankers, bonuses and stimulus (which makes you think) and under places we find Sri Lanka, Swat, Dubai and Copenhagen . As ever, it's generally not good news for a place to be in the news. Top organisations in the news were Taliban, Hamas, LTTE and Trafigura (a British company involved in a pollution scandal). How does this all compare with 10 years ago? Have things got better? In 1999, the top people keywords were the crisis leaders Clinton, Milosevic, Pinochet, Yeltsin and Barak (note the spelling – this was Ehud Barak, the former Israeli prime minister), and the top places were the crisis centres of Kosovo, Serbia, East Timor, Albania and Seattle (where violent protests took place against the World Trade Organisation). Not much improvement there. However, if you look at the last set that I've researched, maybe there are some signs of hope. In 1999 under the heading society I found: ethnic (cleansing), independence, bombing and GM . In 2009, I found: healthcare, Facebook, Twitter and swine flu . Progress? At least there are signs that people have been communicating with one another. Any resolutions for 2019?