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Discrimination in discourses 379

is used as a discriminating marker of “Jewishness”, for instance the two compul-
sory first names “Sara” and “Israel” prescribed by the Nazis on August 17, 1938
for all female and male Jews in Nazi Germany (see Berding 2003: 177); (iii) Spe-
cific surnames are used as antonomastic ethnicist slurs such as “Piefke”, a pejor-
ative anthroponym for Germans, especially referring to Germans from the North
of Germany.
(5) Among the pragmatic means of discriminatory nomination are deictic ex-
pressions. They may relate to personal deixis, such as distancing and debasing
“they” and “those”, to local deixis such as “down there” or “out there”, or to
“social deixis” such as condescending asymmetrical personal address with the
German “du”-form (for instance in “foreigner talk”). Metalinguistic comments
or puns on allegedly alien first names or surnames are also potential pragmatic
means of discrimination connected with nomination too.
Van Leeuwen’s (1996) concepts relating to the representation of social actors
allow us to analytically grasp some of the more subtle forms of discriminatorily
constructing, identifying or hiding social actors:
The social actors’ exclusion from linguistic representation is often em-
ployed to veil persons responsible for discriminatory actions. It becomes impli-
cit discrimination by non-nomination in cases such as the sexist non-naming of
women (pretending, for example, that the so-called “generic masculine” in lan-
guages like German would linguistically include them), or in cases of linguistic
under-representation of ethnic minorities by not giving them sufficient access to
and voice in mass media and by not reporting about them to an adequate extent.
The linguistic exclusion can be a radical, total one which leaves no lexical or
grammatical traces in the discursive representation of specific social actors. Van
Leeuwen calls this form of linguistic exclusion “suppression” (Van Leeuwen
1996: 38). If the exclusion is partial and leaves some traces that enable readers
or hearers to infer the excluded social actors with more or less certainty, van
Leeuwen speaks about “backgrounding” (Van Leeuwen 1996: 38). The passive
is a syntactic means of backgrounding.
If persons are nominated, i.e. linguistically included, the inclusion is not al-
ways an indicator of fair and just representation and treatment, but can some-
times have a disguising, relativizing or averting function. Such is the case, if the
linguistic inclusion pretends that there is equal treatment, whereas inequalities
and injustices remain in effect. Strategies of linguistic inclusion which can be-
come discriminatory are (according to van Leeuwen):

(1) “genericization”, i.e. the general nomination of a whole group of persons
(e.g. “Germans”),
(2) “assimilation”, i.e. the reference to social actors as groups, which can be
realized by