Journal of Language and Discrimination

Implicit and Explicit Language Attitudes: Mapping Linguistic Prejudice and Attitude Change in England Robert M. McKenzie and Andrew McNeill (2023)

Morana Lukač — 2023-02-13

Implicit and Explicit Language Attitudes: Mapping Linguistic Prejudice and Attitude Change in England Robert M. McKenzie and Andrew McNeill (2023) New York and London: Routledge, 194 pp.

Language Incompetence: Learning to Communicate Through Cancer, Disability, and Anomalous Embodiment By S. Canagarajah (2022)

Gregory Hadley — 2023-02-13

Language Incompetence: Learning to Communicate Through Cancer, Disability, and Anomalous Embodiment By S. Canagarajah (2022) London and New York: Routledge, xv + 220 pp.

Sexualising weight loss in British tabloids

Tara Coltman-Patel — 2023-02-13

This paper explores the relationship between weight loss, sex and beauty by analysing a corpus of 285 articles about celebrity weight loss published in the UK national press between 23 March 2020 and 6 July 2020. Taking a corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis approach, we examine the use of the statistically salient lemma flaunt*. Ninety-seven per cent of the instances of flaunt* in our corpus are attributed to female celebrities, and the respective protagonists are reported by the UK press to flaunt their bodies and their weight loss on their social media pages. By critically analysing the use of flaunt*, we are able to demonstrate the manner in which celebrity social media posts are repackaged to sexualise female celebrities and to sexualise the process of weight loss in general. We argue that describing social media images shared by female celebrities as flaunting could at best, misrepresent their intentions, and at worst contribute towards the pervasive unsolicited sexualisation of women, and exacerbate adverse body image and mental health issues during the COVID-19 pandemic which in and of itself has exacerbated these issues.

‘Chinese virus’

Peiwen Wang — 2023-02-13

Since the emergence of COVID-19, researchers have documented an increase in cases of anti-Asian racism and hate crimes. Research shows a possible connection between the ‘Chinese virus’ discourse of the Trump administration and violence in society (Arora and Kim 2020:387). Drawing from critical discourse studies we explore 2,071 comments from one YouTube video which documents anti-China rhetoric by the Trump administration in order to understand the underlying strategies commenters relied on in their reproduction and defence of this discourse. Findings show the trickle-down influence of Trump’s discourse on YouTube commenters, but also ways in which social media created a platform for building solidarity among racist groups, as well as sites of resistance. The authors conclude by suggesting more studies attend to this type of discourse and work to educate people on how to counter it.

‘Cycling is good’ but ‘cyclists are reckless’

M Cristina Caimotto — 2023-02-13

Urban mobility choices and policies are not a common object of study for linguistics. These policies and choices actually generate forms of discrimination by creating reified identities of ‘drivers’ against ‘cyclists’ against ‘pedestrians’. Through the prism of ‘mobility justice’ this paper shows how detrimental discursive choices contribute to the normalisation of a mobility system which is highly discriminatory and a source of toxicity and danger to humanity. The discriminations imposed by the hegemonic system of automobility reinforce other forms of intersectional discrimination. By looking at journalistic texts that employ road-user identities to fuel narratives of conflict, this study highlights the need for linguists to contribute to language-focused investigations already being carried out from the perspectives of other disciplines such as Geography, Sociology or Transport Studies. It also shows how these investigations can provide answers to broader questions concerning climate inaction.

Impact of state indifference on ethnolinguistic vitality

Musavir Ahmed — 2023-02-13

This paper reports on ethnolinguistic vitality and the impact of state indifference on it among Baltis of Kargil in Ladakh division of former Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) state in India. The Baltis of Kargil have registered a negative population growth over last three consecutive decades in official records even when the population of district Kargil and former J&K state has been increasing substantially during the period. From 48,498 individuals in 1981, the group has been reduced to 13,774 individuals in 2011. Surprisingly the Purigpa, another ethnic group in Kargil closely related to the Baltis, have registered a substantial decadal growth rate of 114% from 2001 to 2011.

Using the cultural autonomy model of ethnolinguistic vitality, the study found the group to be moderately strong in collective group identity and strong in social proximity, however a weak institutional control and a very weak ideological legitimacy reflected in a huge decrease in population of the group in official records is indicative of state indifference, which has weakened the vitality of the group.

‘It came from China; it’s a Chinese virus’

Sofia Lampropoulou — 2023-02-13

This study examines the negotiations of racism by Twitter users in the representation of the COVID-19 crisis during the first wave of the pandemic. We focus on expressions that target China as the place where COVID originated such as ‘Chinese virus’ and ‘Kung flu’. The repeated use and discussion of these terms on social media serves to create, establish and reinforce indexical links (Silverstein 2003) to social values, which relate to ideological conceptions of China and Chinese culture. Additionally, Twitter users’ crisis processing involves the renegotiatation of indexical links to social values that coincides with the engagement in sociopolitical debates that frequent online media environments, resulting in sociological fractionation (Agha 2007); the ideological opposition between Twitter user groups involves statements such as ‘Kung flu is racist but COVID originated in China’s dirty markets.’ We see such disclaimers as examples of ‘liquid racism’ (Weaver 2011) that, while they are difficult to pin down as racist, they naturalise Sinophobia as the dominant discourse in our dataset. We conclude that racism in our data is a resource embedded in blame attribution that is compatible with crisis processing.