Hate speech as a communicative category

The current paper aims at determining and describing functional potential of language units to actualize verbal aggression in politicians’ speeches. The “hate speech” used by people to express negative feelings and emotions towards other people or groups includes negative and rude phrases and expressions. These expressions can be targeted at any category of people whether it is a racial, ethnic, political or religious group. “Hate speech” may be based on stereotypes and prejudices that may be false or exaggerated. We used politicians’ quotations for the period of 2021–2023 as the material for this study. The total of 200 tokens were selected from articles in modern media (Nikkei Asia, Reuters) as well as from videos on YouTube. Component, contextual and dictionary definitions analyses enabled to discover the features of growing verbal aggression expressed in the use of lexical units with the meaning of military action, nuclear war, weapons of mass destruction and the resulting catastrophic consequences. Applying such units to the situations of nonmilitary nature is an obvious demonstration of manipulative strategy. The communicative category of “hate speech” can be used to separate groups of people and nurture a conflict between them. It should be noted that the use of “hate speech” can lead to more serious consequences, such as discrimination and violence.