Linguistic (in)TOLERANCE of the host community in the context of modern migration in France

 

Anna S. Borisova¹, Oksana I. Aleksandrova², Ekatherina D. Kalinnikova³

¹PhD, Associate professor Department of Foreign Languages, Philological Faculty, RUDN University, Russia, borisova_as@pfur.ru

²PhD, Associate professor Department of Russian and General Linguistics, Philological Faculty, RUDN University, Russia, aleksandrova_oi@pfur.ru

³PhD student Department of Foreign Languages, Philological Faculty, RUDN University, Russia, kate.dk01@gmail.com

Abstract 

The paper outlines one of the key migration issues in area of concern that have emerged since 2016, namely: perception of migrants by the host community. The aim of this paper is to consider tolerant/intolerant statements as targeted verbal regulative actions that have a certain emotional and pragmatic impact on users. The research is based on a corpus of small-format texts in online French-language environment (social networks) between the years 2016-2020. The total number of posts and comments is 1,518. The study investigated the data from the perspective of the theory of discourse, pragmatics and psychosemantics. The methods of observation, description, interpretation, sampling and quantitative data collection techniques were applied. The analysis shows that social networks proved to be a pragmatically effective tool:  the attitude towards migrants in France is changing for a worse. Online reports of intolerant speech behavior in relation to the modern migration situation have increased. The study revealed growing local aggression and hostility that may propagate more serious forms of conduct, such as xenophobia and racist violence.

Keywords: migration, France, Internet discourse, linguistics, host community, (in)tolerance