“Maybe that's correct, maybe it's false”: (Un)certainty in COVID-19 political speech

Effective crisis communication entails being transparent about current uncertainties, whereas ignoring or hiding uncertainties can decrease public trust in the crisis management practices. Despite the increased interest in public crisis communication due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we still lack linguistic research on how uncertainties have been acknowledged by political leaders in their messages to the public. Therefore, our understanding of what works and what does not is limited. This study analyses how British PM Boris Johnson and US President Donald Trump expressed (un)certainty in their 2020 COVID-19 briefings. The findings show that both leaders expressed certainty more often than uncertainty, in particular at the beginning of the pandemic. I argue that their limited acknowledgement of uncertainty may have reduced public trust and hindered crisis management.