Naming people on the move according to the political agenda: A study of Belgian media

Abstract

The aim of this article is to study the different denominations used to name people on the move in the Belgian French- and Dutch-speaking press. The so-called ‘refugee crisis’ has received huge media attention in Europe. In Belgium, media landscape is divided amongst Dutch-, French- and much smaller German-speaking communities, all of which harbour different journalistic traditions. The country is then an excellent case study to observe the divergences between the linguistic repertoire of denominations referencing people in the two main linguistic communities. To explore this, an exhaustive corpus composed of press articles was collected between 2015 and 2017. The analysis combines Discourse Analysis and Corpus Linguistics as they complement one another. At first, the repertoire of common nouns in each corpus seems similar, but differences lie in the frequency of denominations used to qualify people on the move and also in the collocations that construct their meaning. In both corpora, the word refugee is strongly collocated with status and administrative terms. One important finding lies in the difference in frequencies of the word migrant, which is used less often in the Dutch-speaking corpus than in the French-speaking one. This article also gives special attention to the terms transmigrant and newcomer.