What is it about?
In this work we study the representation of Muslims on the Internet in Spain. After the terrorist attacks in Europe, Islamophobia and Muslimophobia have grown considerably in our society. There is a strong rejection of Muslim groups and individuals, they are perceived not only as different, but also as dangerous and violent. We follow a cognitive linguistics approach using corpus linguistics as a methodology in order to know which concepts are related to Muslims in discourse. We have used three corpora: the Spanish part of the esTenTen corpus, which is a large web corpus intended to give a picture of the Spanish language on the Internet; a Twitter corpus encompassing tweets published by five main political parties in Spain and their candidates in 2015-2016; and a third corpus of articles on the topic “Muslims” from four important digital newspapers (El País, La Vanguardia, La Voz de Galicia, and ABC). We examine word co-occurrence patterns of islámico (‘Islamic’) and musulmán (‘Muslim’) to shed light on the stigmatization of this minority in the online discourse and its frequent presence in negative frames.
Featured Image
Why is it important?
Though the social reality of Muslims in Spain is very complex (Spaniards, immigrants, tourists, refugees, etc.), the discourse found on Internet is partial and shallow. Even when Muslims are mentioned as belonging to a common past in Spain, they are pictured only as military invaders (“Them” as historical enemies in our territory). When it is a frame of “Them” as victims of injustice related to Islamophobia/Muslimophobia, they still are at the other end of the Us vs. Them polarization. As result of our research, we can confirm the stigmatization of this minority in the digital discourse.
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: The framing of Muslims on the Spanish Internet, Lodz Papers in Pragmatics, December 2017, De Gruyter,
DOI: 10.1515/lpp-2017-0013.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page