Danish and German folk perceptions of hate speech: popular usage and popular reasoning

This paper discusses usage-based conceptions of the term ‘hate speech’ in Danish and German to understand ‘folk’ perceptions of the expression in the two languages. The study is based on popular usage of the term on social media and metareflective discourse on hate speech in interviews with native speakers. The findings show that the English loan word ‘hate speech’ and its German and Danish loan translations are metapragmatically significant expressions which function as evaluative tokens for moral assessments of communicative behaviour as part of politicised discursive practice online. Notably, the interviewees do not reference these online practices, pointing to a gap between spontaneous linguistic performance and metacommunicative awareness. Comparison across the languages further reveals variation in the ideological-political discourses into which the hate speech token is recruited online as well as differences in the moral orientations underpinning the understanding of hate speech in popular reasoning.