Unveiling Language Prejudice: A Corpus-Based Analysis of Racial Slurs Across Genres

Authors

  • Fadhlur Rahman Institut Agama Islam Negeri Lhokseumawe, Indonesia
  • Ella Yuzar Institut Agama Islam Negeri Langsa, Indonesia
  • Mohammad Kholid Orange College Melbourne, Australia

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.33394/jollt.v12i2.10753

Keywords:

Racial slurs, Corpus, African-american

Abstract

Discrimination and racism have been obvious for decades. This encompasses derogatory racial epithets such as "nigger, niggers, n-words". The objective of this study was to employ corpus-based analysis in order to examine the frequency of racial derogatory expressions across various genres of literature. The COCA (Corpus of Contemporary American English) data were employed to perform a corpus-based linguistic analysis of the terms 'nigger', 'niggers', and 'n-word' over a span of 20 years (1990 to 2019).  Although the words "niggers" and "n-word" have similar meanings, the occurrence of the word "niggers" and "n-word" in the corpora was significantly less frequent compared to the word "nigger." Primarily, the term "niggers" was used as a plural indicator for the derogatory term "nigger". The frequency with which individuals who use derogatory language, such as the term "niggers," associate themselves with pronouns like "they," "us," "those," "all of you," etc., suggests the existence of these patterns. The sole term that displays a notably diverse frequency distribution across genres is the n-word (in comparison to these two terms).

Author Biographies

Fadhlur Rahman, Institut Agama Islam Negeri Lhokseumawe

English Language Education Study Program, Faculty of Education and Teacher Training Institut Agama Islam Negeri Lhokseumawe, North Aceh, Indonesia

Ella Yuzar, Institut Agama Islam Negeri Langsa

English Education Study Program, Faculty of Education and Teacher Training, Institut Agama Islam Negeri Langsa, East Aceh, Indonesia

Mohammad Kholid, Orange College Melbourne

English Language Study and Training Program, Orange College, Melbourne, Australia

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Published

2024-04-22

How to Cite

Rahman, F., Yuzar, E., & Kholid, M. (2024). Unveiling Language Prejudice: A Corpus-Based Analysis of Racial Slurs Across Genres. Journal of Languages and Language Teaching, 12(2), 941–951. https://doi.org/10.33394/jollt.v12i2.10753

Issue

Vol. 12 No. 2 (2024)

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