Zeitschrift für Kulturphilosophie 2020/1: Entfesselte Sprache?

Obviously, there exists a link between language, debates, and actions. In this sense, the decay of language and the culture of debating threatens to harm democracy and its values. Especially social media and online language usage influence this language change, as they seem to favour irrational and polarising language over rational speech. Accordingly, this has serious political and societal consequences. Thus, a mature, democratic society has to develop new ways of dealing with heated debates and conflicts.

With the establishment of social media, the media and communication system changes fundamentally: new norms and rules of social communication are formed. Above all, new, active forms of media use show massive disruptions in public and private communication. Social media institutionalize new forms of individual, group, network, organizational and mass communication. The new institutional- ization processes need to be shaped politically so that a new culture of responsibil- ity can be established. The communication policy approach is developed and justi- fied in this article.

The universally lamented unleashing of language is a symptom. But not a symp- tom of an indeed alarming political development or even of a general cultural de- cay. Instead, it is a symptom of political maturation: everyone is allowed to speak for oneself nowadays. Piercing and brutal become those speakers, who do not feel heard and consider themselves impotent. If one is supposed to remedy this process, one must concede power of language to everyone as well as a power to efficiently act upon the world.

In this paper, various forms and concepts of ›unleashed language‹ (entfesselte Sprache) are discussed, particularly in connection with the phenomenon of ›hate speech‹. Against a linguistic-interdisciplinary background, the author argues for the social relevance of language criticism and of criticism of speaker‹s integrity, too. Thereby, the author develops her argumentation by introducing and explain- ing the concepts of ›language culture‹ (descriptive) and ›language cultivation‹ (nor- mative).

This contribution aims to examine whether the notion of a »brutalization« or »un- leashing« of language is accessible to linguistic operationalization. Public com- plaints about a brutalization of language refer primarily to political communica- tion, especially the language use of right-wing populists. Examples are used to illustrate that the term »language brutalization« relates primarily to the breaking of linguistic taboos from the far right fringe of the political spectrum. These are deliberately committed attempts to extend the limits of what can be said. At the same time, however, it is claimed that controversial topics remain taboo, making public controversy seemingly impossible.

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