Navigating the continuum of harmful speech

Abstract This article examines escalation in racist discourse on Greek X by tracing two recurrent formulations: δεν ακούς ελληνικά (‘you don’t hear any Greek’) and καθαρίστε την Ελλάδα (‘clean Greece’). The dataset comprises 180 publicly accessible posts (May 2012–January 2024), sampled across migration-salient periods and analysed as posts-in-context. Reflexive thematic analysis maps patterns and guides exemplar selection. Combining Wodak’s Discourse-Historical Approach with a speech-act lens, we track escalation through three pragmatic diagnostics: shifts in illocutionary force, uptake-licensing, and perlocutionary design. ‘You don’t hear any Greek’ functions as a portable grievance: a deictically anchored sensory claim condensing fears of linguistic and cultural displacement, paired with criminalisation and threat topoi. This crisis framing can be re-keyed into directives culminating in ‘clean Greece’, where purity metaphors and dehumanising nomination lower moral barriers and recruit audiences for violent responses. We conclude by mapping findings onto a graduated response framework aligned to the degree of escalation.