Abstract/Summary

This article tackles the topic of European public discourses of migration through the notion of cultural keywords (cf. Williams 1983, Bennett et al. 2005, Wierzbicka 1997) combined with Corpus Assisted Discourse Analysis in order to take a comparative view of the use of the key words multicultural and multiculturalism. The study is based on corpora from British, French, German and Italian newspaper articles covering the time span 1998-2012, collated from one conservative and one left-liberal national newspaper in each language. Across the languages, the results show that multicultural is mostly descriptive of a state of affairs, typically without negative evaluation. Multiculturalism is associated with abstract concepts and points to a more negative discourse prosody, indicated by collocates such as ‘failure’.