Representing Minorities in Times of Conflict : A Corpus-Based Analysis of Letters to the Editor

This comparative study of the linguistic representation of minorities across different historical and socio-political contexts addresses a unique and under-researched area in linguistics, focusing on letters to the editor (LTEs) as a genre of news discourse. The book provides insights into how public opinion and ideological stances are reflected in LTEs, offering a valuable perspective for interdisciplinary applications in history, media studies and linguistics.

Focussing on two distinct conflicts across a century, the Armenian genocide and the Russian-Ukrainian war, and on their representation in the British press, the book shows how corpus methods and discourse analysis can assist socio-historical research towards a deeper understanding of the events as seen through the eyes of the public. The author begins by explaining the genre of LTEs and how they have changed over the course of a century with dramatic technological innovations and a shift in news production and consumption. She considers differences and similarities in the ideological depiction of minorities, using long-standing broadsheet newspapers such as The Times, The Telegraph and The Guardian, to cover all main political orientations and to ensure a comparison among newspapers that were published both at the beginning of the 20th century and those published one century later. The corpus includes over 600 published LTEs for both case studies (Armenian and Ukrainian) selected from print and online newspaper archives.

While history is usually told through the eyes of the winners, or of the majorities, Representing Minorities in Times of Conflict offers fresh insights into how minorities are linguistically represented during conflicts.