Linguistic Patterns of Racism in German Football

This research analyzes the media discourse on racism in football in Germany. The main goal of this paper is to find linguistic patterns that should reflect the way in which racist behavior is related to the immigrant background of certain football players. For this purpose, several media texts were selected that describe cases in which some German football players were exposed to racism, such as Jérôme Boateng, Mesut Özil and Gerald Asamoah. These three show different contexts that encouraged racist behavior towards them, but all three cases could be summed up by Mesut Özil’s sentence: “German when we win, immigrant when we lose”. The methodology applied in this work is based on the linguistic analysis of the discourse. This approach has especially developed among German linguists who believe that discourse analysis should be conducted exclusively on the basis of the language itself and linguistic patterns, and that conclusions are drawn only on the basis of what is linguistically realized.