LANGUAGE AWARENESS IN POLITICAL DISCOURSE(ON THE EXAMPLE OF GEORGIA (THE COUNTRY)

Abstract

This study examines language hierarchy and language attitudes in Georgian political Media discourse through an analysis of code-switching, code-mixing, register-switching and style-shifting drawing on interaction-al sociolinguistics and conversation analysis the research investigates: 1. how language hierarchy is constructed and reconstructed in political discourse, 2. how changes in audience or addressee shape speakers’ language choices and 3. how multilingual practices are used to project political identity and group affiliation. The data were collected over 24 months (from July 2023 to July 2025) from Georgian television and online media. From a corpus of 3,210 political video recordings, 400 were randomly selected and analyzed qualitatively, yielding 55 instances of style-shifting, 46 of register-switching, 14 of code-mixing, and five of intersentential code-switching. To substantiate the discourse-analytic findings, a matched-guise experiment was conducted with 103 respondents, thereby allowing an indirect measure of language attitudes to-ward Georgian, English, Russian, and German. The results demonstrate that Georgian functions as the dominant language for persuasion, alignment, and ideological framing, while non-Georgian languages primarily serve symbolic and stance-marking resources. English, Russian, and German are used predominantly to convey irony, hu-mor, and distancing, rather than communicative necessity. Notably, Russian is strongly associated with ironic and sarcastic evaluations reflecting its historical and political salience in Georgia, whereas English indexes both pro-European orientation and rhetorical mockery. The findings suggest that the language hierarchy in Georgian political discourse is not static but is dynamically negotiated through interactional context, audience design, and speakers’ strategic identity work.