Major Themes in Imran Khan's UNGA Speeches: A Corpus Assisted Study

Abstract

Every year, the United Nations General Assembly holds a meeting of leaders from different countries. Imran Khan, prime minister of Pakistan, made speeches in the General Assembly of the United Nations twice. The first emphatic address he made at the United Nations General Assembly was on 27 September 2019, and the second was on 25 September 2020. This study aims to find out the major themes in both speeches and examine the frequently used words in the two speeches. For this study, his two speeches were taken from the internet and converted into plain text to compile a corpus. AntConc was used to find out the frequency of frequently used terms and to demonstrate the concordance of frequently used words. The results reveal substantial similarities and slight variations in the content of the two speeches. The major themes highlighted in the speech were India, RSS, Kashmir, Islamophobia, and climate change.