This book deals with the construction of the ‘other’ in European media at a time when the recently expanded EU is facing new political, economic and social challenges. The aim of the book is to document the diverse discursive forms of othering, ranging from differentiation to discrimination, that are directed against various ‘other Europeans’ in both institutionalized media and such non-elite semi-public contexts as discussion forums and citizen blogs. Drawing on data from British, Polish, French, Czech, Italian, Hungarian, Spanish and Estonian contexts, the individual papers investigate how various social groupings – regions, nations, ethnicities, communities, cultures – are discursively constructed as ‘outsiders’ rather than ‘insiders’, as ‘them’ rather than ‘us’. While most of the papers are grounded in linguistics and critical discourse studies, the book will also appeal to numerous other social scientists interested in the interface between language, media and social issues.

This book focuses on the language of two unions (the United Kingdom and the European Union), tracing the emergence of divisive discourses from indyref to Brexit. It explains the background to the creation of these unions and summarizes recent political events that have brought their future into question. It considers which identities (national, supranational, social, ethnic or racial) were invoked during the indyref and EU referendum campaigns, emphasising the crucial role played by language in maintaining these identities, in conceptualizing the nation, to do politics, and its power to unite or divide. Based on analysis of three specialist corpora totaling over 143 million words and comprising multiple text types (newspapers, speeches, Twitter posts, parliamentary debates, party political websites and campaign materials), it interrogates the language used by politicians, the media and the public, uncovering increasingly problematic, scaremongering, xenophobic and incendiary linguistic strategies used to divide us from them.

The 21st century has witnessed some of the largest human migrations in history. Europe in particular has seen a major influx of refugees, redefining notions of borders and national identity. This interdisciplinary volume brings together leading international scholars of migration from perspectives as varied as literature, linguistics, area and cultural studies, media and communication, visual arts, and film studies. Together, they offer innovative interpretations of migrants and contemporary migration to Europe, enriching today’s political and media landscape, and engaging with the ongoing debate on forced mobility and rights of both extra-European migrants and European citizens.

Both Britain and the United States have had a long history of harbouring foreign political exiles, who often set up periodicals which significantly contributed to community-building and political debates. However, this varied and complex journalism has received little attention to date, particularly regarding the languages in which it was produced. This wide-ranging edited volume brings together for the first time interdisciplinary case studies of the exile foreign-language press (in French, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Flemish, Polish, among other languages) across Britain and the US, establishing a useful comparative framework to explore how periodicals tackled key political, linguistic and literary issues from the 19th century to the present day. Building on the existing literature on the exile foreign-language press in the United States and developing the study of this phenomenon in the British context, Immigration and Exile Foreign-Language Press in the UK and in the US offers fresh perspectives into how these marginalised periodicals influenced the political, economic and social contexts that brought them into existence. This is a major contribution to the burgeoning field of transnational periodicals and will be of interest to anyone studying the history of the Anglo-American press, the history of immigration and cultural history.

While we tend to divide the world into Us and Them, a number of grey nuances exist beyond this white and black distinction. The purpose of this book is to address the fuzzy areas between Us and Them through the study of European belonging as it is represented in the French elite daily, Le Monde. Corpora collected from 2014 to 2017 are used for case studies in the framework of Discourse Analysis to look at the use of “Europe” in headlines, and the representation of the United Kingdom, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Ukraine, Belarus, and Turkey. The combination of these case studies allows to present a conceptual framework for the representation of Europe by Le Monde. However, beyond the study of what belonging to Europe means for Le Monde, this book is about the legitimacy of being “in-between”, i.e. belonging neither totally to Us nor to Them.

Though the refugee crisis was discussed in many countries e.g. in Greece, Hungary, Italy and Spain long before 2015, it began to receive cross- European press coverage only after Angela Merkel’s statement ‘Wir schaffen das!’ on the August 30th 2015 This data-based study focuses on, how journalists report on and leading politicians make statements about refugees, migrants and asylum seekers in media and frame these humans after Angela Merkels’ sentence in 2015 until the end of 2017. This volume uses mainly Corpus Linguistics but also Communicative Science for the analysis of labelling strategies and the usage of words, collocations and grammar systems used by journalists and politicians in different European countries in comparison. This empirical volume pictures language specific variation and change of labels. To enable a contrastive study between the press discourses of many European countries, every chapter analyses the data consisting of newspaper articles describing the discourse of a particular country, including discourses of some transit countries around the borders of the Schengen Area of the European Union, which barely have been covered in other studies.

This book explores representations of social media in European media discourses across different socio-historical contexts, demonstrating how such analysis can illuminate the tension between global and local in media discourses in today's globalized world.