Journal of Language and Politics - Online First

Populism has been on the rise in Europe, especially in the last decade. Finland is no exception, and a populist party ‘The Finns Party’ has gained momentum since the 2011 parliamentary election. The purpose of this paper is to examine the discourses of the Finns Party in their official releases on immigration and language in the 2015 parliamentary election. The socio-politically situated examination draws from Foucauldian Discourse Analysis, especially the concepts of biopower, biopolitics, racism, governmentality and subject position. In addition, language identity, language ideologies, and populism are used to discuss how linguistic identity and ideology are perceived and constructed in the data, especially in terms of discourses of inclusion and exclusion of ethnically Finnish but linguistically non-dominant groups, and immigrants.

This article analyses the use of (deliberate) metaphors in political discourse produced by French-speaking Belgian regional parliamentarians during non-institutional political interviews. The article first investigates if the use of deliberate metaphor limits itself to a particular type of political discourse (i.e. public and institutional political discourse) or if metaphor use is also found in other types of settings (i.e. non-institutional political discourse). Second, the article analyses the variation of deliberate metaphor use between political actors depending on gender, seniority and political affiliation. To this end, the article applies Steen’s ( 2008 ) three-dimensional model of metaphor analysis on biographical interviews conducted with French-speaking Belgian regional parliamentarians (RMPs). Our results indicate that RMPs, when using non-deliberate metaphors, mostly rely on source domains such as construction, battle and relationships. This is in contrast with the use of deliberate metaphors, where source domains like sports, nature and container take the upper hand.

Why do Thai governments fail in maintaining peace through conducting a reconciliation process? This article answers this question through an assessment of how the term reconciliation has been defined and used by the Thai governments and political leaders during the past decades. This article finds that the political conflicts in Thailand have never been solved because several times, reconciliation in the Thai language is a term that has been dynamically interpreted and applied by leaders of the conflicting groups as a means to defeat the people of the opposing groups rather that a means of resolving problems and reconciling society.