UNGD Linguistic Evolution
Seventy years of General Debate speeches, read as one evolving conversation.
Each September, world leaders take the podium at the UN General Debate. Their speeches form one of the richest longitudinal corpora in politics: the same institution, the same ritual, every country, every year. This project tracks how the language of diplomacy itself evolves — which words rise, which fall, and how the meaning of a term like 'security' quietly shifts beneath a stable surface.
Research Questions
- How does the shared vocabulary of diplomacy drift over half a century?
- When do new concepts — 'terrorism', 'climate', 'cyber' — enter the discourse?
- Do word meanings shift, and can diachronic embeddings detect it?
The corpus
The UN General Debate Corpus collects the annual statement of every member state since 1970 — tens of thousands of speeches, aligned by year and country. Because the setting is held constant, changes in the text are changes in the world's rhetorical priorities rather than artifacts of format.
Method
Dynamic topic models trace the rise and fall of themes; diachronic word embeddings — a separate vector space aligned per era — reveal when a term's neighbours change, exposing semantic drift. Per-country trajectories are then compared to see who leads and who follows the global conversation.
Early findings
'Development' cedes ground to 'sustainability'; 'terrorism' spikes sharply post-2001 and never fully recedes; 'climate' climbs from the margins to a top-tier theme after 2007. The interactive timeline lets you scrub any keyword across the decades and see which nations put it on the agenda first.
13 metrics, 1946 – 2022
Rhetorical markers, readability and sentiment, and topical word rates — each charted as a yearly average with a degree-5 polynomial trend. Hover any line for the exact year and value.
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