Internet-Zeitschrift für Kulturwissenschaften	17. Nr.	März 2010
Sektion 2.12.	Multilingualism, Language Contact and Socio-cultural Dynamics Sektionsleiter | Section Chair: George Echu (University of Yaounde I) Dokumentation | Documentation | Documentation

Reflections of Social Stereotypes
in Modern Bulgarian and English Phraseology

Ellie Boyadzhieva (Western University of Blagoevgrad, Bulgaria) [BIO]

Email: e.boyadzhieva@gmail.com

Introduction

It is a well-established view among linguists in general and sociolinguists in particular that language reflects the developments of the society which it serves, following not only the transition processes in the economic, political and social life, but also rendering the beliefs and ways of thinking of the peoples sharing one and the same language in a given society. This relation may well be defined as the ‘mirror effect’ (Boyadzhieva, 2006).

The paper focuses on the meanings and underlying concepts of some set phrases and phraseological units in English and Bulgarian containing ethnonyms, words denoting ethnicity or nationality, in order to find out what values they bear in the respective languages and thus arrive at conclusions as to how a language can reflect some stereotypical attitudes to foreign cultures. Special attention is paid to the transition from traditional models reflected in English set phrases containing ethnonyms to similar ones in Bulgarian. Some conclusions are drawn concerning the similarities and differences between the existing stereotypical concepts and attitudes to otherness in the two cultures.

Both Bulgarian and English societies can be regarded as being in a process of transition from a confined ex-soviet-like type of society for Bulgaria and an on-island type of society for England to more open multicultural ones within the boundaries of the present EU. In this way the issue of the possibilities to break up with traditional stereotypes on the one hand, and to resist to the ‘borrowing’ of new ones as a result of the intensifying cultural contacts in the global world in compliance with the general struggle for ethnic tolerance worldwide is discussed.

One basic view on which the paper is based claims that when social and ethnic prejudices are involved which reflect a nation’s beliefs concerning the place and the status of other ethnicities within one society  and which are part and parcel of a native speaker’s language competence there is no difference between developed and developing countries.

Motivation

Phraseology is an inherent part of human languages. Clichés and conventional similes convey concepts which are a result of life experience and thus, though indirectly, reflect the national mentality of the native speakers of a language, bringing about rendering certain implications.

The phraseological units which contain ethnonyms in particular reproduce long-existing attitudes of one ethic group to another so that they can be regarded as overt language bearers of hidden established social and racial stereotypes. They are acquired naturally during the mother tongue acquisition process and are part of the native speaker’s competence.

Hypothesis

Phraseological units containing ethnonyms reflect historically established attitudes of one nation to another, thus representing the stereotypical perception of the native speakers of a language of other ethnic or racial groups.

Goal

The main object of this study is first of all to analyze English and Bulgarian phraseological units containing ethnonyms, and discuss their figurative meanings and underlying concepts in order to elicit those that are most frequent, i.e. – belong to the standard language and have not turned into dead metaphors, thus excluding dialectisms and colloquialisms. Second, to classify their connotations as positive or negative, in order to find out what standard stereotypes they reflect and finally, to contrast the language data of the two languages so as to specify which are nation specific and which are commonly shared in both languages.

Basic linguistic terms

In linguistics, phraseological units are generally assumed to be rather figures of speech than compositional constructs. Phraseology then may be said to describe predominantly the context in which a word-phrase is used. This includes typical stable word-groups with partially or fully transferred meanings.

Bengt Altenberg (1998) states that phraseology is a fuzzy part of language. It embraces the conventional rather than the productive or rule-governed side of language, involving various kinds of composite units and “pre-patterned” expressions such as idioms, fixed phrases, and collocations. According to Glaeser (1998: 125), a phraseological unit is a lexicalized, reproducible bilexemic or polylexemic word group in common use, which has relative syntactic and semantic stability, may be idiomatized, may carry connotations, and may have an emphatic or intensifying function in a text.

In this paper, phraseological unit is used as a general term for all constructions which have the following basic features:

1. Non-compositionality: The meaning of a collocation is not a straightforward composition of the meaning of its parts [for example, the meaning of kick the bucket no longer has anything to do with kicking buckets];
2. Non-substitutability: One cannot substitute a word in a collocation with a related word [kick the pail instead of kick the bucket is impossible];
3. Non-modifiability: One cannot modify a collocation or apply syntactic transformations [John kicked the green bucket or the bucket was kicked have non-idiomatic meanings].

Ethnonyms: An ethnonym (Greek έθνος ethnos, 'tribe', + όνομα onoma, 'name') is the name of an ethnic group. If that name has been assigned by another group, it is referred to as an exonym; if it is self-assigned, it is known as endonym. For example the ethnically dominant group in Germany are the Germans, an exonym carried into English from Latin; the Germans refer to themselves by the endonym "Deutsch".

As language develops, ethnonyms which were at one time neutral may accumulate additional positive, or more often than not, negative meaning. Once the so called ethnonymic connotations are established, they almost regularly become stable properties of the language coming to reflect a commonly shared evaluation of otherness in a given society. In this way, the initially neutral and acceptable idioms may often become offensive and used as ethnic slurs.

An ethnic slur can be anything from an insinuation or critical remark to an insult. Ethnic slurs are, or have been, used as insinuations or allegations about members of a given ethnicity or to refer to them in a derogatory (critical or disrespectful), pejorative (disapproving or contemptuous), or downright insulting manner. This is a diachronic language process that can be clearly illustrated by numerous examples of internationally accepted ethnonym-turned-ethnic slurs in history such as Vandal, Barbarian, Philistine, Gypsy etc. Perhaps the most notable example in Modern English is the ethnonym Negro/ Nigger.

Basic cultural anthropological terms

Stereotypes: Stereotypes are generalizations about groups and their individual members, based primarily on membership in that group. They may be positive or negative on the one hand and they may be accurate or inaccurate regarding average characteristics of a group, on the other. Some social anthropologists consider all stereotypes to be negative because they are unjust to individuals who often vary from average group characteristics. Different disciplines give different accounts of how stereotypes develop: psychologists focus on experiences with groups, patterns of communication about groups, and intergroup conflicts. Sociologists focus on the relations among groups and position of different groups in a social structure. Psychoanalytically-oriented humanists have argued (e.g. Sander Gilman 2006) that stereotypes, by definition, are never accurate representations, but a projection of an individual's fears onto others, regardless of reality. Surprisingly, although stereotypes are rarely entirely accurate, statistical studies have shown that in some cases stereotypes do represent measurable facts(1) (Robertson 1989; Introduction).

Negative stereotypes are typically based on prejudices. Though human beings are innately prejudicial (i.e. preference-directed) in their nature, in modern anthropology prejudice is understood as any unreasonable attitude that is unusually resistant to rational influence  and thus can be harmful and can be termed bias. For example, if a person has developed the concept that members of one group have some characteristics because of a sour past with a member of that group, that person may presume that all members of the group have such characteristics. Prejudices against people from other countries and regions are very often expressed by jokes or statements. Phraseology as part of a language bears historically developed prejudices, which have turned into stereotypes.

Although there is a causal relation between prejudices and stereotypes a distinction between them should be borne in mind: stereotypes are a generalization or rather overgeneralization of characteristics and thus they reduce complexity. Prejudices are either an abstract-general preconception or an attitude towards individuals. Prejudices are usually based on general stereotypical conceptions of our everyday "reality" (including persons [even ourselves], objects, processes, facts, value-norms, rules etc.). However, they need to be converted into "attitudes", in order to be considered as "prejudices", and they usually carry a negative connotation.

Phraseology and culture

Phraseological units can be generally referred to as colloquial metaphors, which means that their use and comprehension require some foundational knowledge, information, or experience which restrict their use only within a given culture where parties must have common reference.

Therefore phraseological units can be considered not only part of the language, but rather part of the culture. As cultures are typically localized, idioms are more often not useful outside that local context. However some idioms can be border-crossing, meaning that they can be used more universally than others, and their underlying concept can be more easily deduced either due to cultural or language transfer or shared historical practices and experiences.

Due to long-time contacts between different ethnic groups on one larger territory, stereotypes are established which reflect the attitudes of one group to another and vice versa. These attitudes are often pinpointed in usual frequent expressions, which gradually have become part of the phraseological word stock of a language. These expressions become a useful source for anthropological and linguistic research in order to understand the relations and attitudes of one ethnic group towards another which are set historically within long periods of time.

Method

The method is the typical two-step contrastive analysis: 1. describing the ethnonymic idioms in each of the languages, and 2. juxtaposing the language data in order to find out the similarities and differences between them. The directionality followed is from English to Bulgarian.

Material

The material on which the analysis is based has been excerpted from phraseological dictionaries or dictionaries of English and Bulgarian idioms both monolingual and bilingual. The English idioms are checked with a native speaker of English in terms of their frequency and degree of negative collocational meaning. The material is classified according to the ethnonym which the phraseological unit contains exemplifying the concept behind the idiom in either of the two languages involved. Next a comparison is provided, which is based on the meaning of the underlying concept in order to elicit which ethnonyms reflect what attitudes in the two languages. The language data is presented in tables 1 and 2. Finally a control corpus of language data containing only Bulgarian idioms is analyzed in order to provide a verification basis for the general conclusions.
         The material is presented in Table 1 below where the ethnonyms are arranged in alphabetical order. The lack of close equivalent in Bulgarian is marked by ‘x’.

Table 1: English idioms and their Bulgarian equivalents

Ethnonym	English idiom	Meaning	Bulgarian equivalent	Connotations
Greek	A Greek gift	A dangerous gift	X	Negative
	A Trojan horse	A dangerous gift	Trojan horse	Negative
	To put off to /At the Greek calends	Never	At the Greek calends	Negative
	Be all Greek to somebody	Totally incomprehensible	Be all Chinese/ Patagonian	Negative
	Byzantine	Complicated and inflexible – of laws, attitudes etc.	X	Negative
	Gay/Merry Greek	A nice companion	X	Positive
Turk	To turn Turk	To become rude and violent	X	Negative
	A young Turk	A young person who is rebellious and difficult to control in a company, team or organization	X	Negative
Dutch	Dutch feast	A party where the host gets drunk first	X	Negative
	A Dutch bargain	Unfair bargain	X	Negative
	As drunk as a Dutchman	Very drunk	Drunk as a Kazak	Negative
	To talk like a Dutch uncle	A person who gives unwelcome advice	X	Negative
	That beats the Dutch	To win against everybody	X	Negative
	I am a Dutchman if…	It’s impossible to…	I am a Turkish Emperor if	Negative
	Dutch concert	Noisy talk of drunk	Gypsy concert	Negative
	Double Dutch	Incomprehensible nonsense	X	Negative
	Go Dutch	To share the bill	X	Negative/ Neutral
	Dutch lunch/supper/treat	A meal where each person pays their own share of the bill	X	Negative/ Neutral
	Dutch courage	The false courage one gets when drunk	X	Negative
	Be in Dutch	To be in a difficult situation	X	Negative
	The Dutch act	Suicide	X	Negative
	Dutch cap	Contraceptive diaphragm (because of the shape)	X	Neutral
	A Dutch auction	Auction sale where the price  is lowered until someone buys the item	X	Negative
	Dutch disease	The deindustrialization of the economy due to the discovery of a natural resource thus raising the value of the currency and making it uncompetitive	X	Negative
	Dutch gold (or metal)	False gold, made from thin copper sheets turned yellow in molten zinc fumes	X	Negative/ Neutral
	Dutch rise	(New Zealand) increase in wages which doesn’t benefit the employee	X	Negative
French	To take a French leave	To leave without being given permission to do so	To take an English leave	Negative
	Pardon my French	Dirty words	X	Negative
	French kiss	A deep open-mouthed kiss with tongue inserted	French kiss	Neutral
	French letter	A condom	X	Neutral
Gypsy	Gypsy reckoning	Stinginess	X	Negative
	She’s a gypsy	She’s wild, uncontrollable, maybe sexually promiscuous	X	Negative
	To be dressed like a gypsy	To wear poor unmatched clothes	Dressed like a gypsy	Negative
Niger	To work like a nigger	To work very hard	To be a white nigger	Negative
	A nigger in the fence/in the woodpile	A hidden difficulty	X	Negative
Jew	Tell that to the Jew	No one is interested in one’s problem	Tell that to the Armenian priest	Negative
	Unbelieving Jew	Somebody who never believes anything	Unbelieving Thomas	Negative
	He’s a real Jew	He’s very mean	X	Negative
	Jew’s eye	Something of very high value (from the custom of torturing Jews for money)	X	Negative
Chinese	A Chinese puzzle	A difficult to understand issue	X	Negative
	A Chinaman’s chance	Very little chance	X	Negative
	Like Chinese arithmetic	If something is complicated and hard to understand	Like Chinese grammar	Negative
	Chinese whispers	1. An exaggerated or distorted story told from person to person. 2. An enjoyable game of passing the message round a circle and seeing what comes out at the end	X	Negative Neutral
	(To give someone) a Chinese burn	To twist the skin of the wrist in opposite directions as a form of mild torture (used by children)	X	Negative
	A Chinese copy	An exact copy of the original	X	Positive
	Chinese restaurant syndrome	To have symptoms such as dizziness, headache thought to be caused by ingesting large amounts of monosodium glutamate, as used in Chinese food	X	Negative
	To be like climbing the Chinese Wall	An insurmountable problem	X	Negative
Russian	Russian roulette	A game of chance where players spin the cylinder of a revolver with only one bullet in and shoot with the barrel against the head	Russian roulette	Negative

Discussion

a. English – Bulgarian direction

The first striking observation is that almost all elicited phrases have negative connotations, which confirms the above views that prejudices build ethnic slurs on language level, which, in their turn reflect stereotypical attitudes toward othernesses. Out of 47 phrases, only 2 have a positive connotation which is 0.94%. Four examples are evaluated as either negative or neutral by native speakers, which represents 1.88% of the material, and two, representing 0.94%, are neutral. This means that in the best case only 3.76% of the analyzed phrases can be interpreted as void of negative meaning, while the rest of 96.24% raise definitely negative associations in the minds of native speaker-listeners. The Bulgarian equivalents, when they exist, are always negative with one exception only, namely ‘French kiss’ which is neutral and is not quite frequent anyway.

Another visible observation is that the Bulgarian language possesses few corresponding phraseological units equivalent to the English original ones. There are 14 equivalents in either the form or meaning between the two languages, which represents 6.58 %, of which 50% (7 examples) are near equivalents, and only 3 are full equivalents: ‘at the Greek calends’, ‘Trojan horse’and ‘French kiss’. This reveals that the discussed phraseological units in English and Bulgarian are quite different in terms of the ethnonyms serving as heads of the phrases. Consequently, one can conclude that ethnonymic phraseological phrases vary, cross linguistically because in essence they reflect cross cultural differences. In the cases when they do not vary, most possibly these come from borrowings. To support this is the argument that phrases like ‘Trojan horse’ and ‘at the Greek calends’ (as well as, to a certain extent, ‘French kiss’) are borrowed by both Bulgarian and English from common sources and they retain their original meaning.

English language data shows an overwhelming number of phrases containing the ethnonym Dutch: 18 cases none of which has a Bulgarian equivalent, which points to the assumption that it is English language specific. All cases refer to various concepts whose meaning invariably implies negative attitude. Only four phrases can be used with neutral connotation. The underlying concepts, based on implicit comparison(2), reveal the willingness to distinguish from the Dutch and to gain prestige over them, by implicitly criticizing their language, their bad habits and unacceptable social behaviour.

The ethnonyms Chinese and Greek appear in 8 and 6 phrases respectively. The main concept behind the phrases with Chinese as head noun is difficult to understand, to happen, incomprehensible. ‘Chinese whispers’ in its second meaning is neutral, and ‘a Chinese copy’ is even positive. Though in the table the rest of the phrases are marked negative, they are not negative per se, but rather embarrassing, causing problems and requiring efforts.

The phrases containing Greek as a head noun are similar in meaning to the ones with Chinese referring to something that is incomprehensible or too complicated. Fear and threat are the concepts underlying the phrases ‘Greek gifts’ and ‘Trojan horse’ already mentioned above. It is interesting to note that one phrase, ‘Merry Greek’ has a positive connotation. It is possible that it is a recent entry in English, coming from the famous Nikos Kazantzakis’ novel Zorba the Greek published in 1946. 

The English ‘Greek gift’ does not have a correspondence in Bulgarian where its meaning is represented by the only equivalent phrase ‘Trojan horse’, an obvious cross linguistic cultural borrowing in both languages descending to Homer’s Illiad as mentioned above. The only phrase that exists in both languages invariably is ‘at Greek calends’, though, in my opinion it is more or less dialectal in Bulgarian, and rarely used in the standard language.(3)

French and Jew are head nouns in 4 phrases for each ethnonym. The phrases with French are divided into two according to their connotations: two negative and two neutral, whereas all four phrases built around Jew are negative. There are four equivalents of the English phrases in Bulgarian: one full and three near equivalents. Surprisingly, the English phrase ‘to take a French leave’ is presented in Bulgarian in the form of a calque by its French equivalent ‘to take an English leave’. Obviously the phrase was borrowed into Bulgarian during the period of the Bulgarian Renaissance when the cultural relations between Bulgaria and France were much closer than those between Bulgaria and England.

Contrary to my expectations, the ethnonym Jew was not of high frequency in either English or Bulgarian. One of the phrases in English has an obvious biblical descent: ‘unbelieving Jew’, whose correspondence in Bulgarian is ‘unbelieving Thomas’, and as Thomas was the proper name of the biblical character the two phrases can be supposed to be equivalent, the English one generalizing through the use of the ethnonym, and the Bulgarian one specifying through the proper name.

The other basic underlying concepts related to Jews are stinginess (which is a common concept in Bulgarian too), lack of interest, and carelessness embodied in ‘tell that to the Jew’, whose phrase correspondence in Bulgarian contains another ethnonym Armenian in the phrase ‘tell that/complain to the Armenian priest’.

Gypsy in English implies stinginess, uncontrollable behaviour and inclination to committing crimes and appears as head ethnonym in three phrases of which one ‘to be dressed like a gypsy’ has a full equivalent in Bulgarian.

Turk appears in English in two closely related meanings rendering the notion of violence and lack of control, which are behavioural characteristics. It is worth noting that neither of the two English phrases have equivalents in Bulgarian, despite the fact that this is the most frequent head ethnonym in the excerpted Bulgarian material.

The ethnonym Nigger in English is represented in two phrases. Nigger is associated with two meanings: hard work, which has been borrowed in Bulgarian in the extended phrase ‘to work like a white nigger’, and suspiciousness which is not comprehensible for the Bulgarian speaker.

The phrase ‘Russian roulette’ exists in both languages with one and the same underlying concept  and is obviously a borrowing which has retained its original meaning in each of them(4) dating to a practice in the Russian army gaining popularity at the beginning of the 20th century.

Summary

The most frequent ethnonym in the English language material is Dutch which serves as a head noun in 19 phrases, all of which are negative and none with a full equivalent in Bulgarian.  There are 3 near equivalents where Bulgarian uses another ethnonym in the same syntactic form and the same underlying concept: Kazak for drunk, Turkish Emperor for impossible and Gypsy for noisy. The second most frequent ethnonym in English is Chinese – 8 phrases of which one is neutral, and one is positive. There are no Bulgarian equivalents, except for ‘Chinese arithmetic’, where arithmetic is substituted by grammar and ends up with the phrase ‘Chinese grammar’. 

Greek is a head noun in six phrases of which there are only two full equivalents in Bulgarian both of which are rather cultural borrowings.

Jew and French are present in four phrases each, where for each ethnonym there are two equivalent phrases in Bulgarian. Gypsy appears in three phrases with one full match in Bulgarian followed by Nigger with two phrases and one near match in Bulgarian, and Russian with one phrase which has a full match in Bulgarian.

b. Bulgarian phrases containing ethnonyms

The Bulgarian examples serve as a control corpus in order to elicit the most important differences between English and Bulgarian phraseological units with an ethnonym as a head noun. The examples in the table below are direct translations of Bulgarian phrases and do not include those full and partial equivalents to the English ones discussed earlier.

Table 2: Bulgarian idioms

Ethnonym	Bulgarian idioms	Meaning	Connotation
German	Like a broken German	Very bad-looking	Negative
Greek/ Byzantine	Byzantine tricks	Lies, unfaithful and deceiving behaviour	Negative
Gypsy	To lie like a bearded/old gypsy	To lie a lot, not to say a true word	Negative
	To turn around as a gypsy in a church	To fidget around, not to be able to concentrate	Negative
	To quiver like a gypsy	To be very cold	Negative
	To speak like gypsies at the market/in a gypsy tavern/at a gypsy wedding	To be very noisy	Negative
	To sit on gypsy ashes	To fidget, to move constantly	Negative
	Like a gypsy sack	A container where you can put useless things endlessly	Negative
	Gypsy heart	Cowardice	Negative
	Like an engaged gypsy	To be vain or excessively aware of one’s self appearance	Negative
	Gypsy summer	Warm late autumn weather	Indian summer Positive/neutral
France/French	Guaranteed by France	No guarantee at all	Negative
Jew/Chifut	When the Jews come back from the Holy lands	Never	Negative
	To turn around as a robbed Jew	Not to know what to do or where to start from	Negative
	Like in a Chifut havra/market	Very dirty and untidy	Negative
	A Jew was born	When a conversation is broken by a sudden silence	Negative
Turk/Turkish	Like (in) a Turkish cemetery	To be silent	Negative
	To have luck like at a Turkish Ramazan	Not to have luck at all	Negative
	To be irritated as a Turk at Ramazan	To be very angry	Negative
	To sleep like a throat-cut Turk	To sleep soundly, to be almost unconscious	Negative
	To be Turk	Jealous and selfish especially referring to men	Negative
	As if a Turk was sitting on it	Something that goes with a lot of difficulty	Negative
	Even if it were Turkish time…	At all costs	Neutral

The prevailing Bulgarian ethnonyms are Gypsy in 9 examples and Turk/Turkish in 8. The underlying concepts associated with gypsies are lies, noisy behaviour, poverty, constant movement from one place to another. It is interesting though, that the phrase ‘Gypsy summer’ corresponding to the English phrase ‘Indian summer’ is fully positive although the underlying negative concept does not change.

From the semantic analysis of the phrases containing Turk in Bulgarian, it can be implied that Turks cause problems and difficulties and bring bad luck, they are silent and communication with them is hindered for no obvious reasons. In comparison with English, the basic properties associated with Turks and Turkish are of characteristics of inner type: selfishness, intolerance, lack of empathy etc.

Jews, concluding from the meaning of the set phrases in Bulgarian, are thought to be dirty and difficult to talk to, qualities that are different compared to the English meanings. The only underlying concept that is shared in both languages is stinginess.

In Bulgarian, none of the phrases associated with Greek has a positive connotation except for the culturally borrowed phrases discussed in the previous section. Moreover, the word Greek is not fixed in Bulgarian phraseology. It is replaced by Byzantine(s),which when referring to the people in Greece (and especially nowadays), has a strong negative connotation.

French and German are rare ethnonyms and are associated with misery and non-trustworthiness, which are non-existent concepts in English.

The ratio between the positive and negative connotations for English and Bulgarian are presented in table 3 below:

Table 3: Positive and negative connotations in English and Bulgarian

Language	Negative	Neutral	Positive	Total
English	39 = 83%	6 = 12%	2 = 4%	47
Bulgarian	29 = 91%	2 =  6%	1 = 3%	32

As can be seen from the figures above, the great majority of the ethnonymic phraseological units evoke negative connotations and the variation between English and Bulgarian is small. The neutral and positive ones present a very small percentage in both languages with a little prevalence for the positive ones in English.

Conclusion

Ethnonymic idioms tend to exist in every human language thus becoming a universal property of its word-stock. Their appearance in a particular language varies cross linguistically as it reflects the particular areal and historical contacts of its speakers. The length and the type of the contact between two ethnic groups heavily influence both the frequency of an ethnonym and the variety of qualities ascribed to different nationalities. Generally, phraseological units based on an ethnonym commonly imply negative attitude to the denoted nationality or race.

The language material discussed above shows a tendency of people to assign more weight to negative information in descriptions of others which is reflected in the ethnonymic phraseological units.

From the viewpoint of contrastive analysis, the following two major cases can be elicited:

• the particular ethnonym is different even when the underlying concepts are shared, or
• there exist phraseological units containing one and the same ethnonym but the underlying concepts do not coincide in meaning.

If there are universal meanings with the use of the same ethnonyms, this may be the case of historically shared prejudices in both countries and their respective languages or, though less likely, it may be a matter of cultural borrowing or pure coincidence.

Generally, ethnonymic phraseological units are based on prejudices. In modernity, to publicly express prejudices against another race or group of people has gradually been turning into a social taboo. This has been bolstered by a degree of legal framework and policy within many large organizations especially in Europe and the USA. Such taboos do not exist endemically outside the public sphere, and numerous cultures and languages still regard alleged slurs as normal everyday language(6).

However, in the era of globalization and the transformation of societies, it is inevitable that the contact between languages in the area of phraseology is an aspect of socio-cultural dynamics and subject to change. This involves not only changes in language use but in the attitudes towards different ethnic groups as well. In this regard, language contact could be seen as an important parameter in observing the transformations in societies, influencing positively the way of thinking and accepting otherness as well.

References

• Altenberg, Bengt (1998) “On the Phraseology of Spoken English: The Evidence of Recurrent Word-Combinations” in A. P. Cowie(Ed.) Phraselogy, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• Baumeister, Roy. R. (2005) The Cultural Animal, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Boyadzhieva, Ellie (2006) “Language Change and Social Practices - the Mirror Effect" in TRANS. Internet-Zeitschrift für Kulturwissenschaften, http://www.inst.at/trans/16Nr/01_5/boyadzhieva16.htm
• Ewen, Stuart and Elizabeth Ewen (2006) Typecasting: On the Arts and Sciences of Human Inequality. New York: Seven Stories Press.
• Gilman, Sander (2006) Multiculturalism and the Jews, New York: Routledge.
• Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1). Random House, Inc. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse (accessed: July 05, 2007)
• Glaeser, Rosemarie (1998) "The Stylistic Potential of Phraselolgical Units in the Light of Genre Analysis" in A. P. Cowie(Ed.) Phraselogy, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• Knappe, Gabriele (2004) Idioms and Fixed Expressions in English Language Study before 1800, Frankfurt: Peter Lang.  
• Robertson, Ian (1989) Society: A Brief Introduction, New York: Worth Publishing.

Internet resources

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negativeativeativity_effect
• Ionescu, Gloria "Tall" Gradation and Comparison, http://www.ici.ro/SIC/sic1998_3/art06.html
• Lippmann, Walter (2004) Public Opinion, http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/6456
• Media Awareness Network. What is a stereotype? Definition, role of stereotyping in the media
• Stereotype & Society A Major Resource: Constantly updated and archived

Anmerkungen:

2.12. Multilingualism, Language Contact and Socio-cultural Dynamics

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