“Refugees from Ukraine are called humans”: A corpus-based critical discourse analysis of Turkish tweets about Ukrainian refugees

Abstract

The arrival of refugees in large numbers has created heated political and public debates across various arenas. Online spaces, specifically social networking platforms, have become a major site for people to express their opinions, feelings, and beliefs toward refugees. Drawing on the principles of corpus analysis, the Discourse-Historical Approach, and multimodal critical discourse analysis, this mixed-methods study explores how online discourses are utilized to portray Ukrainian refugees in Turkish tweets in the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The findings showed that the linguistic and visual elements used to characterize Ukrainian refugees, as well as the characteristics attributed to and presumptions and justifications made about them, constructed a positive portrayal, unlike the portrayals of other major refugee groups reported in the literature. This positive representation of Ukrainian refugees as welcomed guests was reinforced through the negative depiction of other refugee groups in Türkiye, particularly Syrians and Afghans, as threats.