From `Political Correctness' to `Politische Korrektheit': Discourses of `PC' in the German Newspaper, Die Welt

Abstract

Discourses of `political correctness' (`PC') are (Anglo-)American in origin. But one of the aims of this special issue of Discourse & Society is to explore `PC' from the perspective of languages other than English and, in this article, we look at the case of German. After providing a brief discursive history of `political correctness' in Germany, we present an empirical study of `PC'-related discourses in a corpus of texts gathered from the newspaper Die Welt. The analysis of the data begins with a quantitative survey of German `PC'-related terms from 1995 to 2000. This is followed by a qualitative analysis of the use of those terms during this period. The article reveals many similarities but also a number of interesting differences between Anglo-American and German discourses of `political correctness', especially where the themes of national identity and the so-called `normalization' of German historical consciousness are concerned.

The social construction of digital danger: debating, defusing and inflating the moral dangers of online humor and pornography in the Netherlands and the United States

“…Postings to the newsgroup fulminating against political correctness (as in other countries, a term mostly used by people who feel they are unjustly silenced, e.g. Hall, 1994;Johnson and Suhr, 2003) suggest that some experience this as a form of enforced self-censorship. The situation is fairly similar to the informal regulation of racist speech in Dutch public debate (Vuijsje, 1997), which has been criticized increasingly for its 'political correctness'.…”

The language of Islamic extremism

“…Renold (2002), for example, argues that the American press use the term fundamentalism so frequently in association v«th Islam that it has become inappropriately synonymous with the religion. In addition, various studies have looked at the Western media , Baker et al 2008, Baker & McEnery 2005, Flowerdew et al 2002, Johnson & Suhr 2003, Martin & Phelan 2002 and politicians' negative representation of Muslims and other "minority" groups that they perceive as a threat to social order (Every & Augoustinos 2007, Lazar & Lazar 2004, Van der Yaik 2003.…”

The Language Ideology of Silence and Silencing in Public Discourse

“…German linguists observed the emerging discourse about political correctness; Frank (1996) notes the negativity of the discourse about pc, but sees pc mainly referring to issues of identity politics, much like Hoffmann (1996) who remains ambivalent in situating pc as either an attempt to protect minorities from discrimination or as policing/censorship. Only later, Kapitzky (2000) and Johnson/Suhr (2003) point out the way in which the anti-pc discourse links with the discourse about the Nazi past.…”