LANGUAGE MECHANISMS OF POLITICAL CAMPAIGNING AMONG THE YOUTH IN THE 2019 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION IN UKRAINE

Olena Ruda, Candidate of Sciences in Philology, Senior Researcher in the Department of Stylistics, Culture of Language, and Sociolinguistics,Institute of the Ukrainian Language of National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine
4 Hrushevs’kyi St., Kyiv 01001, Ukraine

Е-mail: olenaruda@yahoo.com
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2157-193X

Heading: Articles
Language: Ukrainian

Abstract: This article looks into the linguistic mechanisms designed to establish communication between the presidential candidate Volodymyr Zelens’kyi and the youth in the 2019 Ukrainian election campaign.

The young voters, who are less familiar with the political, economic, and social processes in the country due to their age and little life experience are at risk of falling victim to political technologists.

The article examines Zelens’kyi’s political projects on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Tele-gram, and Viber channels, the Twitter page of his campaign stuff, and the personal Facebook page. Aside from technological techniques, the paper focuses on the discourse of the election campaign built by the technologists to win the favor of young voters. It examines a linguistic component of the election rhetoric of this particular political project and reconstructs the main messages addressed to the youth. A complex of special linguistic methods has been applied to the texts,e.g., content analysis, discourse analysis, and critical discourse analysis, which helps “to deci-pher” the ideological components.

Successfully selected channels, practices, and methods of virtual communication, “cor-rect” messages, and manipulative methods of the language use of the election campaign waged by Zelens’kyi, e.g., the clash of two generations theme, were converted into the votes “in favour” for the previously inactive electoral group.

Convergence tactics were used to adjust the language to the younger generation. These in-clude the use of vocabulary from the Internet and the latest technologies, borrowings, informal youth forms of address, slang forms, language games, graphic capabilities of electronic space, in particular hashtags, stickers, and emojis.

Keywords: communication, social networking, targeting, Facebook, vulgarisms, slang. 

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