Political correctness and language of the media – before 1989 and nowadays

Description

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Elena Krejčová is Associate Professor at the Department of Slavic studies, Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University in Brno (Czechia). She studied Czech Studies, Bulgarian Studies, English and American Studies at Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski (Bulgaria), and completed her doctoral studies at Masaryk university in Brno (1999). Her main areas of research include political linguistics, sociolinguistics, contrastive linguistics of Slavic languages, theory of translation. Elena Krejčová is the author of monographs Slavonic Babylon (2016), Quo Vadis, Philologia? (2017), The Power of Public Speech (2017) and author of dictionaries Czech- Bulgarian Law Dictionary (2015) and Czech-Bulgarian Specialized Dictionary of Legal, Economic and Socio-political Terminology (2016).

Political correctness as a way of forming the principles of communication and in particular the verbal behaviour is very strongly connected with the period of totalitarianism in the countries of the former socialist block (including Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, etc.). The idea of “right” and “wrong”, i.e. unacceptable speaking, thinking, behavior that is treated as a crime, the battle of ideas and ideologies is well presented in media as a tool of propaganda before 1989, this close relation between communication and political systems was a part of the state policy. What happened after 1989 – did we finally gain freedom of speech? Media after the “Velvet revolution” changed a lot – from the feeling of freedom with no restrictions that ended up to vulgarization of language to the new requirements in society to treat people without prejudice and discrimination.