Discriminatory discourses against Morocco and Moroccan immigrants in the Spanish context. A corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis of ‘Jovenlandia/jovenlandés’ (Youthland/Youthlandian) on X

Abstract

Media discourse has provided a breeding ground for the advent of new patterns of discrimination with the power of influencing the public narrative. This goal of this study is to analyze how the recently-created terms ‘Jovenlandia’ (Youthland) and ‘jovenlandés’ (Youthlandian) are employed mockingly on X in response to the use of generic ‘joven’ (youth, youngster) in news articles. With the use of these terms, X users imply a supposed cancel culture in mass media that withholds data of Muslim immigrant criminals. The theoretical approach adopted combines corpus tools with Critical Discourse Analysis to examine 3856 posts on X during the 2023 Spanish general election campaign (from May 29th to July 23rd 2023). The analysis is based on Wodak’s discourse-historical approach and examines referential and predication strategies to unveil the linguistic expressions to represent immigrants. The results show that the words serve to construct a racist discursive representation of Moroccan migrant identities on the platform X in Spain. Immigrants are portrayed as violent, criminals, and rapists, whereas Morocco is depicted as a land of criminals with homophobic and sexist traditions. The discursive strategies against migrants were commonly grounded in the Muslims’ perceived failure to assimilate into the Spanish culture. In this sense, pork meat is used as a symbolic cultural criterion for evaluating authentic Spanish adherence. Spaniards are self-portrayed as victims of the left-wing government decisions and X users appeal to the extreme-right wing party Vox to solve the problem.