The Use of Creative Compounding in German Online Hate Speech

Abstract Summary

Abstract :

The linguistic means by which hate speech translates negative, discriminatory stereotypes held in the mind into spoken or written form comprise mechanisms such as othering, generalizations, metaphor and the use of slurs. Not least at the lexical level, some of these mechanisms are language-dependent. Thus, with the exception of English, Germanic languages are morphologically productive in hateful discourse, employing derogatory prefixes and evocative compounding. In particular, this can be seen in the less restrained and more immediate form of communication found in online social media, an additional factor being the need to evade word-based automatic censorship.







Based on a large, grammatically annotated corpus of Facebook and Twitter posts (1.5 billion words), this paper examines the role of morphology in German online hate speech. The data were harvested over a 2-year period 2017-2019, with a special focus on the refugee crisis, immigration, islam and nationalist discourse. A Constraint Grammar parser (GerGram) was used to identify, lemmatize and analyse compounds. Not least productive compounds, i.e. compounds not already in the parser lexicon, were then inspected in a frequency-based fashion.







As expected, there was an abundance of derogatory prefixation of minority terms (e.g. 'Drecks-', 'Scheiss-' etc.) and ad-hoc slurs, built by integrating a pre-existing derogatory term into a compound, typically as the second part: 'Sandneger'("sand nigger"), 'Asylschmarotzer'("asylum parasite"), 'Muslimaschlampe'(Muslim hore), 'Linksfaschos'("left-wing fascist"). Stereotypes were often expressed as negatively connotated first parts, creating slur-like expressions even without a "real" slur part: 'Lügenmoslem'("lying Muslim"), 'Steinzeitmoslem'("stone age Muslim"), 'Pädomoslem' ("pedophile Muslim"). Sometimes compounds imply whole narratives, such as the planned-invasion [conspiracy] theory ('Völkerpumpe' - "peoples pump", 'Transfernomaden' - "transfer nomads") or the lying-media manipulation theory ('Nannymedien' - "nanny media", 'Meinungsterror' - "opinion terror"). Even further densification is found in fusion words ('Krimmigrant' - "criminal immigrant") or orthograpical puns ('ISlam').

Pre-recorded video :