Naming 'the Other': Terms of Migrants across Varieties of English

This chapter addresses the process of “Othering” with regard to migrants and asylum seekers, one of the most aggravating world problems today. It focuses on the terms 'migrant', 'immigrant', 'expatriate', 'alien', 'refugee' and 'asylum seeker' and on their semantic and discourse prosodies in World Englishes, applying corpus-assisted discourse analysis and using the Corpus of Global Web-based English. Immigrants and other non-nationals are usually considered as intruders by local citizens and the term 'immigrant' usually collocates with a range of offensive and demeaning words, conveying a negative semantic prosody. The ensuing institutional and legal debate is explored and more neutral near-synonyms discussed, showing that they reveal underlying ideologies and attitudes in each host country.