Discursive change in the public rhetoric of Turkish President Erdogan (2014–2025): a corpus-based quantitative analysis

Section: Media Language

This study applies quantitative discourse analysis to a corpus of 1,888 public speeches delivered by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan during his presidency. The corpus covers August 28, 2014 through December 31, 2025. It contains 3.3 million words. The study tests how legitimacy work in leader discourse responds to periods of crisis. It also evaluates which themes persist over time. The crisis context includes the post-coup attempt security agenda, the pandemic, and episodes of economic volatility. The texts underwent cleaning and normalization. Turkish morphology required additional processing. The analysis therefore uses morphological simplification and concept consolidation. The study tracks 48 key concepts that were selected through theory-driven and data-driven procedures. It measures each concept by normalized frequency per 1,000 words across years. Lexical diversity is measured with the Guiraud Index to reduce sensitivity to text length. The findings run against the common claim that presidential discourse tends to simplify over time. Instead, the results indicate lexical enrichment and institutionalization. Collective identity and faith-based language show strong stability across periods. This pattern is especially clear for recurring anchors.” Security and terrorism language intensifies most clearly between 2016 and 2019. After 2020 themes of economy and development become more salient. This shift suggests a move toward output-based or performance-based legitimacy. Overall, the results indicate that presidential discourse is organized through a multilayered and adaptive legitimacy strategy. Its center of gravity changes with context rather than following a single ideological axis.

DOI: 10.55959/msu.vestnik.journ.3.2026.2969

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