From `Political Correctness' to `Politische Korrektheit': Discourses of `PC' in the German Newspaper, Die Welt

Abstract

Discourses of `political correctness' (`PC') are (Anglo-)American in origin. But one of the aims of this special issue of Discourse & Society is to explore `PC' from the perspective of languages other than English and, in this article, we look at the case of German. After providing a brief discursive history of `political correctness' in Germany, we present an empirical study of `PC'-related discourses in a corpus of texts gathered from the newspaper Die Welt. The analysis of the data begins with a quantitative survey of German `PC'-related terms from 1995 to 2000. This is followed by a qualitative analysis of the use of those terms during this period. The article reveals many similarities but also a number of interesting differences between Anglo-American and German discourses of `political correctness', especially where the themes of national identity and the so-called `normalization' of German historical consciousness are concerned.