Linguistic impoliteness and religiously aggravated hate crime in England and Wales

Jonathan Culpeper,Abe Sweiry,Paul Iganski

doi:10.1075/jlac.5.1.01cul

Jonathan Culpeper, Abe Sweiry + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1075/jlac.5.1.01cul

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Abstract

Abstract Despite its centrality to religiously aggravated hate crime recorded in England and Wales, the nature of the language used has been neglected in research. This paper, based on a unique dataset, aims to rectify this. It takes its approach from the field of linguistic impoliteness, a field that has yet to consider hate crime. Therein lies our second aim: To consider whether impoliteness notions can be usefully extended to the language of hate crime. In our data, we examine, in particular, conventionalized impoliteness formulae, insults, threats, incitement and taboo words. Whilst we reveal some linguistic support for the way religiously aggravated hate crime is framed in the law and discussed in the legal literature, we highlight areas of neglect and potential ambiguity. Regarding impoliteness, we demonstrate its effectiveness as an approach to these data, but we also highlight areas of neglect in that literature too, notably, non-conditional threats and incitement.

Highlights

Compared with the situation in the United States, access to language data relating to the courtroom in the UK is highly restricted
To date, there has been no scholarly assessment of precisely what language uttered under what circumstance has been deemed to be in violation of that act. This leads to the specific research question we will address: what are the linguistic characteristics of speech deemed by legal authorities in England and Wales as having the potential to be an indicator of religiously aggravated hate crime? We will approach our data with work on linguistic impoliteness (e.g. Culpeper 2011) in mind
We established that such hate crime is dominated by pre-fabricated conventionalized impoliteness formulae

Summary

Introduction

Compared with the situation in the United States, access to language data relating to the courtroom in the UK is highly restricted. This work focused on the personal and societal wounds inflicted by racist speech, and as a consequence advocated that such speech—and equivalent “wordless speech” (Matsuda 1989, 2332)—should be treated as a sui generis category of speech for proscription under criminal law in the United States Such theorising mostly cited racist hate speech generically in the abstract rather than examined the linguistic characteristics of the actual use of hate speech. In our paper we use more recently developed impoliteness notions and frameworks, not to make inferences about the impact of hate speech as Asquith theorised, but to analyze the linguistic characteristics of hate speech which brought the use of particular utterances to be prosecuted under the criminal law in England and Wales as religiously aggravated hate crime

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