ABSTRACT
While previous research has shown that the language used to describe migration in the mass media often is stereotyping and stigmatising, there is only limited comparative research on the discursive representations of migrants in European mass media. To remedy this, this chapter focuses on the discursive representations of migrants in European media in terms of its linguistic features. It illustrates the social inequalities and structures of discrimination against migrant minorities inherent to the migration discourse. The chapter follows a mixed-method approach, combining computational and linguistic/critical approaches to media texts. We focus on the concept of linguistic modifiers to capture the language use employed in the discursive construction of migrants in six European countries. The scale of this analysis, including six countries, on the one hand, and the combined analysis of multiple different languages, on the other, represents a novelty in the field of discourse analysis. Among other things, the results show that migrants experience strong linguistic othering throughout all included media and countries. In general, migrants are almost unanimously modified as illegal and represented as very strongly othered and dehumanised. Similarly, the motivations of people on the move are often normatively devalued, with linguistic features implying that migrants are driven by impure reasons.
