ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we show how there has been a marked shift in the way we talk about leaders. We do this by analyzing the British National Corpus and the English Web 2015 (enTenTen15) – two collections of huge numbers of samples of written and spoken language from a wide range of sources. These are chosen to represent a wide cross-section of British English. Our analysis shows that whereas in the early 1990s the term ‘leader’ was used mainly for politicians, by 2015 this political use of the term had been overtaken by its use in business.
