Ethnic Insults

Ethnic insults are the most obvious linguistic manifestation of xenophobia and prejudice against out-groups. They are usually based on malicious, ironic, or humorous distortions of the target group’s identity or “otherness.” Stereotypes, blasons populaires, and nicknames are also major contributing features, used to create and label these identities. The key factor in the development of a term of abuse is not the word itself, but who uses it. As J.L. Dillard points out, “even nigger was not offensive to Blacks until whites used it in a derogatory way” (1977, 96). The word field does not grow consistently, but shows periods of comparative stasis and marked expansion. These generally coincide with periods of migration, religious conflict, war, territorial expansion, political and business rivalry, immigration, and colonialism. Distinguishing features like race or color obviously play a major role.

Up to about a half-century ago ethnic insults had a fairly common and undisturbed currency. They were not marked as “offensive” or “taboo” in dictionaries, nor were they stigmatized as were words regarded as profane, obscene, or indecent. It is significant that the first lexicographer to focus on such terms should have been an American: H.L. Mencken included notes on terms of ethnic abuse in the early editions of his great work, The American Language (1919–1945). Assessing the growth of such words Irving Lewis Allen observes in his major study, The Language of Ethnic Conflict , “Over a thousand usually derogatory terms for more than 50 American groups have been accumulated in scholarly records of slang and of dialectal English” (1983, 7). Eric Partridge, the intrepid researcher of the lexical underworld of British English, recorded many offensive ethnic terms, but did not focus on them especially. Generally speaking, the topic has been accorded a greater degree of academic interest in the United States than in the United Kingdom.

In recent decades the use of ethnic slurs has rightly become an issue of great sensitivity and protests, even leading to court proceedings. (The term ethnic itself, currently more favored than racial or racist , is a virtual euphemism, although it was originally a chauvinistically hostile term: Greek ethnikos , meaning “heathen,” denoting those nations that were not Christian or Jewish—that is, Gentile, pagan, or heathen.) Despite official dissuasions and prohibitions, ethnic terms continue to maintain currency. A great number of terms in the semantic field have their own entries, as can be seen from the list below as well as the entries for Blacks, Chinese, English, French, Germans, Irish, Italians, Japanese, and Jews.
The Semantic Field of Xenophobia and Ethnic Insults


The earliest terms in the word field date from the Middle Ages and have a religious basis: hence heathen, infidel, paynim (pagan), and bugger , which originally meant “a heretic.” This group was later joined by kaffir , originally meaning an infidel, from the Islamic point of view. The religious ructions of the Reformation generated many hostile terms for Catholics, such as papist , R omish , and Jesuit . Several general terms like savage, alien, barbarian , and foreigner obviously derive from prejudicial notions about the superiority of the “home” culture and the barbarism of outsiders. Some fairly neutral descriptive words have taken on an edge of hostility. The semantic history of barbarian shows clearly that the term has been successively applied, by the Greeks, Romans, and Christians, to cultural outsiders. Interestingly, a much older civilization, the Chinese, applied the sense “barbarian” via the character “I” to the English. Some general names for foreigners have acquired connotations of barbarism, the most prominent being Vandal, Goth , and Hottentot . All these terms were originally ethnographic, Goth referring to the ancient Germanic people from about 900 and Vandal and Hottentot used similarly from the seventeenth century. All were being used in a hostile fashion by the eighteenth century to stigmatize someone devoid of culture or destructive of art. This is still the prime sense of vandal , although the meaning has generalized into a barbaric wanton destroyer; the other two terms have become largely historical.

The catalyst of war is very striking in its immediacy and power. In the course of World War I a whole array of nicknames and hostile terms for the Germans emerges: boche is first recorded in 1914, fritz in 1915, kraut in 1918, and jerry in 1919. In American English, Yankee is a prime example; having been originally applied to the Dutch settlers in the United States, it was then used as a term of contempt for a Union soldier during the Civil War, but was appropriated for American soldiers generally during World War I. Nevertheless, it still retains a hostile overtone, especially when used by foreigners to signify an American.

Several terms of ethnic insult are unspecific. Thus, although frog has been used by the English for the French from the eighteenth century, it was used previously for the Jesuits (1626) and the Dutch (1652). Likewise, in American English gook has in a short period performed many xenophobic roles, expressing hostility toward the interloper, the business rival, and the military enemy. References can be found to Haitians from 1920, Filipinos from 1935, Koreans from 1947, the Japanese from 1959, and perhaps most powerfully, to the Viet Cong from 1969. Similarly, dago was generally applied in the United States from the 1820s to Spaniards and Mexicans, but from the 1880s it was used more of Italians. However, the first instance in the Oxford English Dictionary (dated 1723) is to “a negro Dago.” In British English the term is, according to the same source, “used disparagingly of any foreigner.” Wog was likewise first used in British English as an ethnic insult for blacks in general, especially by colonial whites, but has since come to be used generally of any foreigner. Sambo and coolie show similar patterns of usage.

Allen’s study incorporates a “Historical Lexicon of Ethnic Epithets,” reflecting in its makeup areas of conflict and rivalry, since by far the largest categories refer to Afro-Americans, Whites, and Jews. While these semantic categories continue to grow, Allen notes that “no new terms for Yankees have been coined for over a century, which suggests a diminishing image of them as a distinctive ethnic group” (1983, 73). On the other hand, in a new theatre of war, he observes (under the terms for Vietnamese): “All nicknames for Vietnamese originated during the Vietnam War were brought forward from the Korean War and World War II” (1983, 69).

Whereas the ideology of America has been of an egalitarian and unified nation from independence, that of Britain has traditionally been based more on hierarchy and national differences. Thus a number of stereotypical notions and blasons populaires have grown up about the other nations in the United Kingdom, according to which the Scots are mean, the Irish wild, and the Welsh overemotional. The nicknames include Jock for a Scotsman, Mick for an Irishman, and Taffy for a Welshman. In earlier times some had more of an edge: bogtrotter was a seventeenth century nickname for an Irishman.

One of the obvious consequences of colonialism has been the denigration of the colonized peoples. This is evidenced in three modes: The first is the use of general categorizing terms such as native , which start as labels of inferiority, as opposed to European . Equally important since the colonizers were white were notions of color and purity, and the words for the different gradations of color. Captain (Frederick) Marryat illustrated the point in Peter Simple in 1834: “A quadroon looks down upon a mulatto, while a mulatto looks down upon a sambo, that is half mulatto and half negro” (chapter xxxi). In the same category are chi-chi and half-breed. Colored , originally a euphemism for black in the United States, and still so used occasionally, was established in South Africa during the period of British rule for the mixed race population during the 1820s. Third, and most obvious, are the more specific labels like kaffir, boer , and hairyback from South Africa, coolie and pariah from India, abo and boong from Australia. As general attitudes of chauvinism and xenophobia grew, so terms like dago, wop, sambo , and wog , which had been fairly specific in meaning, became applied indiscriminately to foreigners. These have all become impacted both in global English as well as the home variety.

That curious feature of British English, Cockney rhyming slang, subsumes ethnic insults into its disguise mechanism by means of irony and humor. Thus army tanks is a coded reference to yanks, bubble and squeak (a common dish made of cabbage) refers to Greek, four by two (a standard size of material) to Jew, lucozade (a health drink) to spade, egg and spoon to coon , and tiddlywinks (a common game) to chinks . Phonetic similarities in xenophobic nicknames are especially noteworthy, existing in two basic categories. One group consists of short and contemptuous names, found in pom, yid, frog, boche/bosch, fritz, kraut, jap, gook, wog, hun , and coon . The other contains ironic diminutives, shown in the ending?y, seen in limey, sheeny, pommy, frenchie, wi-wi, whitey, honky, jerry, paki, eyetie , and yankee .

An important indicator of the assimilation of an ethnic insult into the language is the degree of grammatical flexibility it develops from its basic noun function. Most terms come to be used as adjectives, an in “a jap car,” “a gook grave,” “a limey suit,” and so on. The further extension as a verb is rarer and significant: thus “they want to frenchify the whole place” or “the West [i.e. Western Australia] is not yet as yankified or pommified to the same extent as is Sydney” (1936, cited in the Australian National Dictionary ). In this regard the term jew is by far the most prolific, showing the depth of the stereotype and labeling as an outsider, evidenced in such forms ( OED sense 3) as jew-boy, jew-butcher , and the verb sense, defined as “to cheat or overreach in the way attributed to Jewish traders or userers,” also “to drive a hard bargain, to haggle.” These meanings are now marked as “offensive.” Equally significant indicators of ethnic hostility are the idiomatic or compounded terms, such as jew hater, jew baiter , and paki-bashing .

Such ingrained lexical forms suggest that attempts to prohibit or discourage ethnic insults face considerable obstacles. Dictionaries and educational programs are obviously efficacious, to a point. A notable development in the United States is the generation of forms like Afro-American and American Indian . These contradict Theodore Roosevelt’s declaration that “There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism” (in a speech on October 12, 1915), but they are an effective way of defining the complexities of identity in a plural society while respecting the dominant fact of nationhood. One problem is that formulations such as Jewish-American or Polish-American do not really exist in natural language; furthermore, equivalents such as Jewish-British or Pakistani-British would be even less natural. However, it is certainly clear that the language of ethnic insult has become genuinely taboo, carrying the strongest prohibition, of being “unspeakable,” as profanity and obscenity previously were.