What exactly falls within this class of acts I have called the ‘political apology’? As with any family of speech acts, especially a relatively novel one, the boundaries are nowhere clearly set out, so this chapter answers that question empirically by describing a range of apologies from the last twenty years. From this survey, one can appreciate not only the international scope and contagious quality of the trend, but also the linguistic fabric of different apologies, and how the actors who delivered them elaborated the significance of their act.

At a very general level, the apologies included here meet three broad criteria. First, they involve a form of words belonging to the family of apologetic speech acts, which includes, inter alia, saying sorry, expressing regret, and asking for forgiveness. As we shall see, this internal linguistic variation is indicative of different meanings, and indeed certain forms of speech may sit at the boundary of the family of acts, implying membership, but not fully or successfully doing the work of apology. Second, they are representative, collective, and public: a leader gives the apology in public on behalf of a collective for which he or she is authorized to speak. This also means that the apology has as its referent a collective that is identified as the victim of the wrong in question.