Language ideology as fake news

Abstract Fake news has a long history despite coming to the fore of academic debates only recently. The current fake news epidemic is related to the rise in right-wing populism globally, while social media has been central to the rapid spread of misinformation and the corrosive influence of right-wing populist discourses thriving on online conspiracy theories and disinformation campaigns. But does this trend have identifiable historical antecedents? I argue that 1980s and 1990s Serbian nationalist propaganda, especially its deployment of pseudoscientific discourses on language with their underlying language ideologies, may be a direct antecedent and an instructive case study for our understanding of the current wave. The discussion is based upon a corpus of Serbian news published between 2003 and 2008, and the application of advanced methods such as exploratory factor analysis and topic modeling. The findings show that the Central South Slavic language conflict has been characterized by pseudoscientific argumentation deployed as (fake) news. I suggest that there is a link between Central South Slavic ethnolinguistic contestation and contemporary Western far right discourses, contending that pseudoscientific argumentation is a major type of fake news in the service of illiberal causes and should be a central element in analyses of the phenomenon.