The discourse formation of the British national identity: topoi

British national identity has been under constant study by scientists for a long period of time, but after Brexit, interest in this topic has increased significantly. The British nation, especially the part of it that was on the side of the Eurosceptics, after Brexit was aimed at strengthening the British identity and completely destroying any influence of globalization on the inner worldview of the British nation. But despite the expectation of the British, many scientists agree that the national British identity is still in crisis. Thus, the object of this research is the topoi of the English-language political discourse of online mass media (magazines, newspapers), and the purpose is to identify the current state of British national identity through the analysis of the topoi of the political discourse of modern Britain. Current works (most are under five years old) Russian and foreign scientists in the field of political discourse and national, including British, identity form the methodological basis of the research. The scientific novelty of the study lies in the fact that for the first time the state of national British identity is considered by analyzing the discursive topoi of current publications of British online publications. The analysis of the topoi of English-language political discourse is based on online media texts for the period from January to August 2025, which makes the study innovative and reflects the trends of modern linguistic science. As a result of the conducted research, it was concluded that the British national identity is expressed by such topoi as the topoi of the monarchy, culture and history, numbers, finance, justice and law-abiding, tolerance, immigration, threats. The most frequent topoi of the discursive formation of the British national identity were the topoi of the monarchy, tolerance, immigration and threats, confirming the crisis of national British identity. The research perspective is to study intertextuality and interdiscursivity as a way of constructing the discursive expression of British national identity, as well as the pragmatic aspect of the discursive formation of national British identity.

discourse, national identity, English language, British national identity, online-magazine, anglicism, political discourse, topos, Brexit, media