Abstract
<jats:p>The paper examines axiological and discursive shifts in the Russian state communicative space of 2025, focusing on one of the year’s central lexical and semantic units, “birth rate”, which was selected as the winner of the Presidential Academy’s project “Word of the Russian State”. The study seeks to demonstrate how the lexical item “birth rate” transcends its status as a statistical category and is reconfigured into the state’s key concept, functioning as an ideologeme through which the image of a “civilizational state” assuming responsibility for the demographic reproduction of the nation is constructed. The theoretical and methodological framework of the research draws on the concept of institutional discourse, critical discourse analysis, as well as approaches in political semiotics and axiological linguistics. The empirical base comprises presidential addresses and speeches, legal and regulatory acts, and federal and regional strategic policy documents. The study employs a set of methods: discourse analysis is used to identify typical communicative scenarios and rhetorical strategies of state discourse; conceptual analysis serves to reconstruct the value‑semantic content of the concept “birth rate”; elements of quantitative corpus analysis are applied to trace the frequency and collocational patterns of key lexical items. It is shown that “birth rate” is embedded in three interrelated semantic domains: demographic security, protection of family and children, and the development of Russia as a civilizational state. The article concludes that in 2025 “birth rate” functions as the state’s key concept of the year, shaping a normative vision of the desired future and acting as a tool of symbolic mobilization around the demographic agenda, thereby revealing how the linguistic framing of demographic policy in state discourse constructs an axiological configuration of time and consolidates the hierarchy of national priorities.</jats:p>