An Investigation of Hate Speech in Italian: Use, Identification, and Perception

Language is a key element in constructing and reinforcing social identities. Through hate speech, language becomes an instrument of creating and spreading stereotypes, discrimination, and social injustices based on attributes such as race, ethnicity, religion, gender, nationality, political ideology, disability, or sexual orientation.

The rise of digital communication, especially social media, has made hate speech a major topic of research in various fields. An Investigation of Hate Speech in Italian analyses hate speech from a linguistic perspective. The focus is not only on lexical means, but also on more subtle grammatical and pragmatic strategies related to implicit meanings or conversational dynamics. The volume identifies the common linguistic characteristics of hate speech in different domains of communication and explores criteria that can help distinguish between hate speech and freedom of expression.

The studies in this volume focus on Italian, but the methods and findings can easily be extended to other languages for comparative and contrastive purposes. The chapters utilize extensive research data. Social media platforms have provided linguistic data that would otherwise be challenging to collect and analyse systematically. The chapters allow readers to link linguistic insights to different real-world contexts, helping them understand the impact language has on various aspects of life and society.

Silvio Cruschina is Professor of Italian in the Department of Languages at the University of Helsinki.

Chiara Gianollo is Associate Professor of Linguistics in the Department of Classical Philology and Italian Studies at the University of Bologna.

Silvio Cruschina is Professor of Italian in the Department of Languages at the University of Helsinki. He specialises in Romance linguistics, in particular Italian, Sicilian, and other dialects of Italy.His area of expertise is syntax, but his research interests range over a variety of subjects and topics, including information structure, pragmatics, and diachronic variation. Together with Chiara Gianollo, he coordinated the project 'ALIHAS-A Linguistic Investigation of Hate Speech', funded by the university alliance UNA Europa (2020‒2022), from which this volume originates. He is the author of Discourse-Related Features and Functional Projections (2012) and, together with Delia Bentley and Francesco Maria Ciconte, of Existentials and Locatives in Romance Dialects of Italy (2015). He has also co-edited several volumes and journal special issues, and has published in international peer-reviewed journals such as Glossa, Natural Language & Linguistic Theory, Isogloss, Word Structure, and Probus.

Chiara Gianollo is Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Bologna. She is a historical linguist, with expertise in the diachrony of Greek, Latin, and Old Romance, and has a special interest in formal approaches to historical syntax and semantics.Her research on the dimensions of linguistic variation extends to the study of multilingualism in migration settings, especially with respect to educational contexts. With Silvio Cruschina she coordinated the project 'ALIHAS-A Linguistic Investigation of Hate Speech', funded by the university alliance UNA Europa (2020-2022), from which this volume originates. She is the author of Indefinites between Latin and Romance (2018). She co-edited, with Agnes Jäger and Doris Penka, Language Change at the Syntax-Semantics Interface (2015); with Ilaria Fiorentini and Nicola Grandi, La classe plurilingue (2020); with Maria Napoli and Klaus von Heusinger, Determiners and Quantifiers: Functions, Variation, and Change (2022).