One of the most fascinating features of language is that it allows us to communicate much more than we actually say. To use a well-worn example, think of the commonplace situation where you spontaneously call up a friend for an impromptu dinner and receive the response “I’m tired.” While your friend utters nothing more than that they are tired, what you essentially hear them say is that they won’t be joining you. That is because the context in which every utterance is produced has a direct bearing on the meaning it communicates.
On top of such immediate communication practices, however, our use of language can also reveal our more general attitude towards the theme that we are talking about. Under the auspices of the Contact project, which was co-funded by the Rights, Equality and Citizenship Programme of the European Union, our team at the Institute of Linguistics and Language Technology of the University of Malta investigated this particular dimension of language use in relation to the ideological stance that people commenting on articles in the Maltese press have when it comes to discussing news reports pertaining to migration and LGBTIQ issues.
The initial aim of the project was to identify and analyse instances of hate speech – a notion that is regulated by the Maltese Criminal Code under Article 82A(1) – in the online comments section posted under news reports in local news portals. However, it soon became evident that in order to understand the roots of potentially xenophobic and homophobic attitudes revealed therein, we needed to go beyond direct insults/threats and focus more closely on the use of stereotypical generalisations as well as tropes, such as metaphor and sarcasm in our collected corpus of articles and comments.
What our analysis revealed is that, while most of the comments that would qualify as hate speech in the legal sense of the term are typically deleted by the relevant portals’ moderators, discriminatory attitudes against the minorities at hand are still omnipresent in the relevant comments sections. When it comes to xenophobia, which appeared to be much more prominent in our dataset than homophobia, it predominantly targets migrants of a Muslim persuasion on the grounds of cultural and religious incompatibility. Then, the main rationale behind comments that were classified as homophobic/transphobic was that the lifestyle of members of the LGBTIQ community does not conform with Christian values. Of course, there were also several comments that aimed to counter the above stances, but while these were noticeably more than their negative counterparts in discussions of LGBTIQ issues, they were far fewer (almost half in number) than negative ones in discussions about migrants.
For further information about the local results, you can see the national report for Malta here: http://reportinghate.eu/
Dr Stavros Assimakopoulos is a lecturer with the Institute of Linguistics and Language Technologies at the University of Malta.
Did you know?
• Our feet are home to about a quarter of all the bones in our bodies.
• Humans have worn shoes for a long time, around 40,000 years according to research estimates.
• The big toe used to be a grasping toe that helped our predecessors climb trees.
• Feet are one of the most ticklish parts of the body. This is due to a large number of nerve endings near the skin.
• Complications of diabetes include poor circulation and nerve damage that can lead to serious skin ulcers and might require toe or feet amputation.
• Women have four times as many foot problems as men, often attributed to wearing heels.
For more trivia see: www.um.edu.mt/think
Sound bites
• Two of Earth’s five mass extinction events – times when more than half of the world’s species died – resulted in the survival of a low number of so-called ‘weedy’ species that spread their sameness across the world as the earth recovered from these dramatic upheavals. The findings could shed light on modern high extinction rates and how biological communities may change in the future.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/10/171010124059.htm
• Scientists have analysed significant changes in the carbon cycle over the last 540 million years, including the five mass extinction events. They have identified ‘thresholds of catastrophe’ in the carbon cycle that, if exceeded, would lead to an unstable environment, and ultimately, mass extinction.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/09/170920182116.htm
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