Victoria Guillén-Nieto Bücher

This volume offers an in-depth analysis of the social phenomenon of migration from various legal-linguistic perspectives. Migration has become a global phenomenon and a burning issue provoking social conflict and political instability in modern societies all over the world. The question of dealing with migrants and asylum seekers has dominated political discourse. It has given rise to national and international legislation on emigration and immigration, some of them including discriminatory provisions, pressed laws against immigration (Acts of exclusion) and prompted anti-migration rhetoric and hate speech against migrants. Important efforts have been made in both common law and civil law jurisdictions to protect migrants' fundamental rights to dignity and equality.

Hate speech has been extensively studied by disciplines such as social psychology, sociology, history, politics and law. Some significant areas of study have been the origins of hate speech in past and modern societies around the world; the way hate speech paves the way for harmful social movements; the socially destructive force of propaganda; and the legal responses to hate speech. On reviewing the literature, one major weakness stands out: hate speech, a crime perpetrated primarily by malicious and damaging language use, has no significant study in the field of linguistics. Historically, pragmatic theories have tended to address language as cooperative action, geared to reciprocally informative polite understanding. As a result of this idealized view of language, negative types of discourse such as harassment, defamation, hate speech, etc. have been neglected as objects of linguistic study. Since they go against social, moral and legal norms, many linguists have wrongly depicted those acts of wrong communication as unusual, anomalous or deviant when they are, in fact, usual and common in modern societies all over the world. The book analyses the challenges legal practitioners and linguists must meet when dealing with hate speech, especially with the advent of new technologies and social networks, and takes a linguistic perspective by targeting the knowledge the linguist can provide that makes harassment actionable.