The article covers issues related to the New Year’s addresses of Vyacheslav Zelimkhanovich Bitarov, the head of the Republic of North Ossetia-Alania, and the Anatoly Ilyich Bibilov, President of the Republic of South Ossetia. as the specifics of political communication small form genre. The genre features and cultural and historical characteristics of the New Year’s address of the head of state are identified and described. The study is based on the methodological platforms of genre analysis, approaches to typologization of speech genres, methods of communication strategies analyzing, methods and techniques of cognitive analysis, methods of conceptological analysis, methods of contextual analysis. The authors identified the typologically inherent characteristics in this political discourse genre based on the multidimensional classification criteria. A detailed analysis of the structural and semantic organization of the New Year address has been carried out. Variants of language codes switching are revealed, namely parity messages duplication, summarization in the Ossetian language, circular bilingual representation of the text. An optical mode of ritual appeal, represented by prayer formulas, has been determined. The types of performativity realized through etiquette congratulations and generally accepted wishes, ethnic well-wishes and clichéd fragments of Ossetian toast-prayers are considered. . The basic concepts of the of New Year’s messages cognitive space are described, including ethnospecific Ossetian concepts «куывд»”(kuyvd”), «фарн» (“farn), «бæркад» (“bаrkad”) and universal concepts “values”, “past”, “future”, “achievements”. The originality of the appeal texts targeting is indicated, it consists in the native land – Ossetia (Iriston) personification and the ethnos differentiation into the North and South Ossetians. According to the study results, it was established that the congratulation texts of the North and South Ossetias leaders are generated on the basis of a stable model, which possesses the genre in political discourse institutional features and ethnic features of traditional Ossetian communication.
