Linguistic approaches to fake news research are growing and maturing: commentary on a special issue

Abstract This first special issue of Linguistics Vanguard on the language of fake news offers multiple perspectives on the linguistic analysis of fake news and misinformation, with a range of approaches and methodologies, showing the sophistication and maturity of the field. The study of fake news is a flourishing area of research, with contributions from communication, media studies, data science, and natural language processing. The growing body of research in linguistics contributes careful qualitative analyses of the social context of production and interpretation of misinformation, coupled with well-documented techniques from corpus linguistics. This commentary provides a short retrospective of linguistic approaches to fake news and highlights the contributions from the papers in the issue.