Diplomatic Language as a Reflection of a Political Stance Regarding the Conflict in Eastern Ukraine

Abstract

The paper features the results of a content analysis of the speeches delivered at the 8726th meeting of UN Security Council on the situation in eastern Ukraine held on 18 February 2020, with the specific goal to explore the correlation between certain speech markers and the political stand of the speaker, in this particular case – each member country’s stance on the agenda and the extent they choose to show their position between the two parties of the conflict, Russia and Ukraine. As a genre of diplomatic discourse, speeches delivered at the UN Security Council meetings are expected to be carefully balanced in terms of the language and restrained in terms of emotions. Thus, any cases of deliberate emotionality, explicit evaluation of other participants’ actions and deviation from diplomatic impartiality and ambiguity are meant to signal the speaker’s distinctive position on the agenda. The analysis resulted in singling out language markers that break with the traditional matter-of-fact tone of diplomats’ speeches on such occasions, the major of them being the use of emotive vocabulary, emphatic syntax, metaphors, hyperboles, idioms, evaluative language, labelling, accusatory rhetoric, modal verbs denoting obligation and determination. The hypothesis that the more frequent is the use of these markers in a speech, the more clearly the speaker wants to show the position of his/her country regarding the parties of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, has been fully confirmed. In our analysis, we also looked at two auxiliary markers, the number of mentions of proper names identifying the parties to the conflict and the length of speeches. The first of them showed that the participants’ desire to “annoy” Russia is directly proportional to the number of Russia’s mentions in their speeches. The length of speeches also in most cases turned out to be indicative of the speaker’s intention to clearly show their position between the conflicting parties. Characteristically, China’s representative’s speech appeared to be not only devoid of any counter-matter-of-fact markers, i.e. the most generally and neutrally phrased, but also the briefest.