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ABSTRACT
This article examines right-leaning press representations of people living in the UK who can’t speak English, or at least speak English well, following the 2011 Census, which was the first to ask respondents about their main language and proficiency in English. The analysis takes a corpus-assisted approach to critical discourse analysis, based on a 1.8 million-word corpus of right-leaning newspaper articles about ‘speak(ing) English’ in the years following this historic Census (2011 to 2016). The analysis reveals the tendency for the press to focus on immigrants – particularly in the contexts of education and health – who are represented with recourse to a series of argumentation strategies, or ‘topoi’. Over the course of this paper, we argue that these topoi are problematic, as they present paradoxes, obscure the role of the Government in ensuring integration, overlook the difficulties of language learning and cultural assimilation, and generally contribute to a broader anti-immigrant UK media narrative which serves to legitimise exclusionary and discriminatory practices against people from minority linguistic and ethnic backgrounds.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to acknowledge the technical support provided by Ikechukwu Onyenwe during data collection and preparation. We would also like to thank Małgorzata Chałupnik for commenting on an earlier draft of this paper, as well as the three anonymous reviewers for their detailed and constructive feedback.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes on contributors
David Wright is Lecturer in Linguistics in the School of Arts and Humanities at Nottingham Trent University, UK. His research interests include forensic linguistics, language in legal and evidential contexts, and discourses of abuse, discrimination and harassment. Mary Ann Evans Building, Clifton Campus, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham NG11 8NS, UK.
Gavin Brookes is Senior Research Associate in the ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science (CASS) in the Department of Linguistics and English Language at Lancaster University, UK. His research interests include corpus linguistics, (critical) discourse studies, multimodality and health communication. FASS Building, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YD, UK.
Notes
1 The asterisk following speak acts as a wildcard for any set of characters, so the search included words like speaks, speaker, speakers and speaking. We decided not to include spoke or spoken in our search term as only a minority of the results produced by these terms (less than 5 per cent) were about speaking English. Instead, these past tense forms tended to be to frame a quote or to indicate that someone had spoken to the newspaper or the media more widely about the topic of the story.
2 Sunday editions and sister publications are subsumed under the main newspaper name, for example Times also covers the Sunday Times. For most newspapers, the counts include articles published in print and online editions, for instance the category Daily Mail includes articles from the printed version of the newspaper as well as the website dailymail.co.uk, with duplicates removed where appropriate. The exceptions to this are the Sun and the Times, for which paywalls preclude the inclusion of online articles in LexisNexis results.
3 This skew also partly results from the fact that LexisNexis only stores articles which originally appeared in the print version of the The Sun, and not those which appeared on its website.
4 Although this method of analysing concordance lines is useful for carrying out qualitative analysis of large corpora, and is indeed well-established in corpus research, it should be noted that this approach does not allow us to meaningfully quantify the prevalence of the topoi we observe. That said, we view the quantification of topoi in this instance as problematic. The conversion of the articles into a plain-text corpus forces us to treat (and count) all topoi as equal. However, we are of the view that any meaningful measure of the prominence of a topos should be sensitive to such factors as the location of the topos within the article (i.e. does it occur within the headline or towards the bottom of the page?), as well as where that article sits within the newspaper more broadly (i.e. does the article feature on the front page of the newspaper or is it buried on a page deep within it).