ABSTRACT

TV election debates involving right-wing populists display a new measure of below-the-belt insults, insinuations, verbal attacks, and verbal injuries. Colloquial German becomes a special language, remaining marked as consciously colloquial. Speaking and acting rest more strongly on one another in the legal context than they do in political communication – through their consistency. Language is thus simultaneously an innermost formulation and an outermost expression. It is a landscape of and for connections. These two interrelated states of language are becoming ever more interlocked – interestingly, this is accompanied by a high level of emotionalization, or rather affectization. It is astounding how increasing medialization can create all the more the impression of authenticity and emotionalization. The linguistic process is a constant transmission process of ideas, affectively loaded images. Language is hard to immunize against it, as most people know from reluctantly adopting formulations carried over from English to German, or suddenly seeing ridiculous neologisms like “unique selling point” built into their language.