Political correctness gone woke in polarised society: the emergence of a new keyword in an old ‘culture war’ discourse

This article investigates firstly the current usage of woke through a corpus-assisted discourse analysis and, secondly, the emergence of woke as a discourse keyword in British newspaper discourse. The analysis of the current usage is based on a purpose-built corpus with just over 2,500 articles from five UK broadsheet newspapers across the political spectrum containing the word woke between October 2021 and October 2022. The corpus-based analysis shows that the collocational profile of woke hardly differs between left-liberal and conservative-right newspapers. However, given that the notion of woke is based on a public discourse characterised by increased polarisation in the context of the so-called ‘culture wars’, a closer look at the concordances reveals clear differences in usage: The discourse on the political right derides woke, whereas the discourse on the left features various ways of distancing from the out-group’s derogatory uses of woke. These results demonstrate the extent to which the use of this discourse keyword is determined by its appropriation by the political right who speak negatively about woke. The analysis of collocations and concordances is complemented by using the corpus to elicit all word formation based on woke, which demonstrates the rapidly increased versatility of its deployment and gives further insights into differences in stance towards woke. The analysis of the emergence of woke seeks to add diachronic depth to the analysis of the current usage by looking at the first uses of woke as discourse keyword in the same five British broadsheets, as well as its relation to preceding words from within the ‘culture wars’ discourse.