The Linguist

@Linguist_CIOL FEBRUARY/MARCH The Linguist 25 FEATURES sexist, transphobic or ableist terms would not eradicate the related phenomena or practices. The rise of populist discourse and narratives has shown that it is the more subtle, or at least less direct, strategies and tropes that have the potential to create more lasting effects of division, categorisation and denigration. Hate speech is defined in national legislations but there is no international legal definition. The United Nations defines it broadly as any kind of communication that attacks or uses pejorative or discriminatory language with reference to a person or a group based on their religion, ethnicity, descent, race, colour, nationality, gender or other identity factor (UN Strategy and Plan of Action on Hate Speech, 2019). This leaves room for interpretation. Hate communication includes non-verbal aspects. The literature also makes an important distinction between hate-motivated and hate- producing communication. Us and them Focusing on racist and xenophobic hate speech, my colleague Anna Szczepaniak- Kozak and I conducted research in Poland and the UK to identify common strategies of othering that exist irrespective of language. 2 In recent years, the countries have become more intertwined through migration and have had their own populist backlashes in the political sphere. We collected newspaper articles, below-the-line (BTL) comments and tweets where hate speech was prevalent. Our results confirm existing research on the mechanisms of othering and hate, but also identify some unexplored trends. 'Us and them' tropes are the most commonly used in our data. The imagined 'us' and 'them' groups are homogeneous and have fixed characteristics, for example 'native British', 'Polish migrants', 'EU migrants', 'hard-working tax-paying migrants', 'Arabs', 'Muslims' and 'teenage yobs', depending on the context of the article. The distinction between 'foreigners' ('intruders' or the seemingly benign 'arrivals', which actually dehumanises) and 'natives' (a disingenuous statement) is a classic example of such tropes. In the UK corpus, the fictionally homogeneous British people are associated with being honourable, well meaning and decent, while the similarly homogenised Polish people are associated either with crime or with hard work. Beyond the 'us and them' reductionist strategy, the theme of undeserving and deserving migrants also emerged. In the UK, comments such as "Polish and Sikh people are the best migrants we have" (Daily Mail, BTL comments, 17/9/17) imply a hierarchy of preference. This pecking order is more evident with the use of the term 'Eastern European migrants', which implies that they are all the same and have distinctive characteristics. The deserving vs undeserving trope is repeatedly used in the Polish corpus by comparing Polish people with Muslims: "The only difference is that we, Poles, work there. Both in weaker positions and in thriving companies and Muslims do nothing. 94% of Poles in England work and pay taxes. Most of the Muslims are unemployed and English and also Poles work for them," (translated from Pudelek, 12/9/16). The narrative is that 'Muslims' or 'Arabs' are lazy and live off the social welfare system, whereas the hard-working Poles pay taxes. The conflation of Muslims and Arabs points to the racialisation of Muslims through the use of a religionym. 3 Religionyms are generalisations used to identify EXTREMIST DISCOURSE The resurgence of populism has been met with a strong backlash. Polish nationalists march in Warsaw (left); and (above) protestors at a march against racism and hate in Seattle Fictional anecdotes and unverified stories are common strategies for trivialising or justifying an event

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