Mention topoi vs. plain use of German ethnophaulisms in social media discourse

Abstract

The article examines the two prominent German ethnophaulisms Kanake and Neger[1] in Facebook posts. It is shown that the K-word is mostly used to disparage the intended group of people, while the N-word is used conspicuously more often in meta-linguistic discussions in which the supposed appropriateness is to be justified (use vs. mention). The different topoi of the argumentation are presented and illustrated in the article.

The study is based on an extensive corpus (> 65 million words) of posts on relevant Facebook pages compiled within the research project “Towards Balance and Boundaries in Public Discourse: Expressing and Perceiving Online Hate Speech (XPEROHS)” (Baumgarten et al. 2019) at the University of Southern Denmark in Odense.

[1] It should be noted that all occurrences of ethnophaulisms in this article are cases of mention (and never use). Nevertheless, where possible, I try not to spell out the insult words but to replace them with alternative expressions (especially N-word).