Phrases with the meaning of ethnic integrativity on the social media pages of Russian government bodies

Abstract

The paper examines the problems of using vocabulary related to the concept of “ethnic integration” in the discourse of Russian government bodies on their social media pages. The authors analyse the reasons for the choice of language tools, their functional purpose and possible consequences of this approach. The aim of the study is to systematise the speech representations of the idea of ethnic integrativity in the official state discourse on social media. The scientific novelty of the study lies in both the material itself (phrases with the meaning of integrativity on the social media pages of government bodies) and in the concept of its analysis (from the perspective of the so-called “plain language”). 358 messages were analysed and 163 phrases were selected. The main emphasis in the study is laid on the analysis of the semantics of the phrases, as well as their common usage / terminologisation. As a result, the prevalence of such phrases on the social media pages of government bodies and their role in having an effective dialogue with the audience were determined. It was found that government bodies take little account of the specifics of this communication channel and prefer to express the semantics of ethnic integrativity through official terminologised phrases.