Lexical and stylistic features in the written media

This paper discusses several lexical and stylistic features that were commonly used in the Albanian press during a period of 30 years (1960-1990) as part of the national ideology and propaganda in communist Albania. This study is based on a large corpus of Albanian newspapers, magazines, and other speeches of the most notable Albanian communist leaders of the time. In recent decades there have been few linguistic studies in Albania that chose to explore the connection between language and totalitarianism. The study of totalitarian language in all its aspects gives us a lot of material to explore the effects of a certain political situation and the ideologization of public discourse on language (especially on the language of the media) and its lexical means. In this work, I focus on the identification of the predominant lexical and stylistic features and finding links between language as a tool of communication and power maintenance and totalitarianism as a political system, to show language abuse and its usage as a tool of propaganda.