The Sovereign Speech Index codifies the major addresses of national leaders across six consistent dimensions — Time, Capability, Agency, Reference, Expression, and Stance — so that the structural posture of a speech can be compared across leaders, nations, and moments.
The same speech can be parsed two ways: by its literal content (what was said) or by its shape (how it was said). The Index focuses on shape. A leader's choices about which time they invoke, which actor they cast as protagonist, and which national-capability domain they speak to are themselves a signal — often clearer than the surface content.
Public addresses are the closest thing to a leader's espoused view made deliberately public. They are crafted, edited, rehearsed, and delivered to specific audiences. Reading them at scale across decades and across nations exposes patterns no single transcript reveals: intentions (what a government commits to do), signals (what it broadcasts to rivals and allies), and perspective (how it positions itself relative to the rest of the world).
That makes structured analysis of these speeches a useful complement to the harder economic, military, and infrastructure data captured in the GINC National Capability Framework. Capability without intention is incomplete; the Index is one way to make intention legible.
The Sovereign Speech Index is open source and maintained by the Global Institute for National Capability (GINC). The full corpus, sentence tags, and underlying methodology are public; the visualisations on this site are one rendering of that data. See the Download page for access.