Toxic Language in East Asia

This book explores examples of ‘toxic language’, the linguistic manifestations of societal conflicts and aggressions, that have arisen in Asian contexts.

By highlighting toxic language, a panoramic concept borrowed from computational linguistics, the book assesses hate speech, harassment, discrimination, cyberbullying, sarcasm, irony and other kinds of offensive, impolite and harmful language that targets individuals, groups and communities based on their gender, race and other factors. With extensive data collected from local and global social media platforms, such as YouTube, Twitter, and Weibo, and offline settings, including political debates, video bullet comments, and song lyrics, this book leverages pragmatics and sociolinguistics to analyze the specific constructions of toxic language, its culture-specific development, and its dynamics in relation to contemporary Asian societies.

Representing authentic data from Asian contexts including Brunei, China, Indonesia, Japan and South Korea, this book will be a valuable resource to students and scholars of Asian society, culture and language as well as researchers working in pragmatics and sociolinguistics.