On June 1, the President of the Republic, Sebastián Piñera, delivered his last speech to the nation. In the address, which lasted 1 hour and 40 minutes (and you can read the analysis here), the five topics most mentioned by the President were “Human Rights”, “order”, “public”, “security” and “land”, according to the word cloud analyzed by José Manuel Ferreiro, Ph.D. in linguistics and current director of research at the Merlin Research consulting firm.

We wanted to go further, however, and asked this expert about the differences between the two messages. “While it is obvious that both speeches are different and the contexts have changed somewhat, a statistical comparison lets us take a closer look at the words used significantly more in each of the State of the Nation speeches,” Ferreiro assures us. Below are the two charts that show which concepts were most used by the president in the 2020 and 2021 speeches.

According to Ferreiro, the topics that were most mentioned in 2020 were “science”, “contagions”, “drugs”, “investment” and “dollars.” From the point of view of the subjects mentioned, last year the President targeted “society,” “compatriots,” “Chileans,” “children,” and “parliamentarians” generally.

Lastly, in the case of actions, he highlighted the use of “going to” (highly specific use in the 2020 speech) indicating that he was still talking about the future, while in that same vein also highlighting concepts such as “commitment”, “change” and “challenges.”

Whereas in 2021, among the most mentioned words in the presidential speech are “Human Rights,” “order” (highly specific use in the 2021 speech), “public,” “security,” “lands,” “vaccines,” “crisis,” “freedoms,” “politics” and “crimes.” The subjects included “peoples,” “indigenous,” “police,” “convention”, “constituent”, “ombudsman,” “population,” “community,” “generations.” Finally, regarding actions, the words that stand out in the last presidential speech are, “safeguard,” “decisions,” “will allow,” “we want” and “must.”