From `Political Correctness' to `Politische Korrektheit': Discourses of `PC' in the G...

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Bibliographic Details
Title: From `Political Correctness' to `Politische Korrektheit': Discourses of `PC' in the German Newspaper, Die Welt;
Authors and Corporations: JOHNSON, SALLY, SUHR, STEPHANIE
In: Discourse & Society, 14, 2003, 1, p. 49-68
published:
SAGE Publications
Media Type: Article, E-Article

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further information
Physical Description: 49-68
ISSN: 0957-9265
1460-3624
DOI: 10.1177/0957926503014001929
published in: Discourse & Society
Language: English
Subjects:
Linguistics and Language
Sociology and Political Science
Language and Linguistics
Communication
Collection: SAGE Publications (CrossRef)
Table of Contents

<jats:p> Discourses of `political correctness' (`PC') are (Anglo-)American in origin. But one of the aims of this special issue of Discourse &amp; Society is to explore `PC' from the perspective of languages other than English and, in this article, we look at the case of German. After providing a brief discursive history of `political correctness' in Germany, we present an empirical study of `PC'-related discourses in a corpus of texts gathered from the newspaper Die Welt. The analysis of the data begins with a quantitative survey of German `PC'-related terms from 1995 to 2000. This is followed by a qualitative analysis of the use of those terms during this period. The article reveals many similarities but also a number of interesting differences between Anglo-American and German discourses of `political correctness', especially where the themes of national identity and the so-called `normalization' of German historical consciousness are concerned. </jats:p>