Aptum, Zeitschrift für Sprachkritik und Sprachkultur 21. Jahrgang. 2025, Heft 2

The ambivalent role of language in politics is also a factor in the battle between democracy and populism. Political and social scientists register crises of democratic structures in many countries and see the causes in dynamically changing socio-economic, socio-cultural, systemic and not least linguistic-communicative conditions. Typical communicative characteristics of populism can be analysed by looking at the rhetorical means of persuasion: logos (rational arguments), ethos (appealing to sympathy) and pathos (emotional arousal). Two German parliamentary speeches (Merz, Weidel) show similar tendencies in the use of logos and ethos, but also clearly different characteristics in the use of pathos elements. One major difference concerns the question of whether or not a populist ideology is being pursued.

The article reflects on how differently linguistics and historical science research linguistic and discursive changes in the recent past. Beginning with the 1990s, when the project ‘Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe’ was completed and the first empirical studies on ‘Sprachgeschichte als Mentalitätsgeschichte’ [history of language as history of mentality] respectively ‘Historische Semantik’ [historical semantics] were published, I present the possibilities and limits of the mutual awareness of the two disciplines and their cooperation in practice. In addition, the different methods and results of the two disciplines are summarised in the provocative thesis that the former "use a sledgehammer to crack a nut" and the latter "explains the world" with little evidence. Moreover I show several examples how historical studies can benefit from discourse linguistic research. Finally, the linguistic research project "Kontroverse Diskurse. Sprachgeschichte als Zeitgeschichte seit 1990" [Controversial Discourses. Linguistic history as contemporary history since 1990] is outlined as an example of current research that could benefit from historical expertise.

The bioethical language in the Berlin Republic was initially shaped by the central topoi of the Council of Europe's Convention on Human Rights and Biomedicine. This debate on the pros and cons of this authoritative bioethical convention, which was also conducted intensively in the German public sphere and has not yet been signed by Germany, was followed in 2001 by numerous statements, initially from the National Ethics Council (NER) and, from 2009, from the German Ethics Council (DER). These statements mark, in a sense, seismic crystallization points and the verbalization of bioethical debates in Germany: the moral status of human beings, the right to selfdetermination as a direct consequence of human dignity, and the self-image of human beings in their relationship to machines (AI) or to non-human animals and to the planetary whole. These crystallization points are at the heart of the following outline.

This essay focuses on the emoji used on the online livestreaming platform “Twitch.tv”, the so-called “emotes”. In contrast to regular emoji, emotes differ in both their appearance and pragmatic use due to their unique nature. Created, uploaded and shared by not just the platform itself but also its users, both streamers and viewers, they are much more malleable and varied than regular emoji. For example, an emote can be an animated .gif image, and many emotes are based on real-life photographs or screenshots of people and their facial expressions. In addition, each emote bears a codename with which it is referred to and used; i. e. writing “PogChamp” in the message window makes the emote appear once it is sent into the chat. Thus, emotes on Twitch fulfill a myriad of uses not entirely covered by the emoji classification by Steffen Pappert. In this essay, emotes are analysed through the lens of this typology, to both prove their similarity to emoji and the ways in which they differ, giving suggestions for further research and expansions into this classification to handle these unique forms of online communication.

This article examines the role of language in Ludwik Fleck’s epistemological work. Two objectives are pursued: Firstly, Fleck’s statements on language scattered throughout his oeuvre are to be systematized and reflected upon. Secondly, the question is asked of which statements of linguists and philosophers from the 19th and 20th centuries can be related to Fleck's work. The basic idea is that Fleck's reflections on thought styles and thought collectives can also be applied to his work to identify possible influences and correlations between Fleck’s remarks on language and those of other philosophers and linguists. Analyzing Fleck's ideas on language and their connections to the theoretical and philosophical considerations of his predecessors reveals his relativistic and deterministic conception of language. According to this conception, language is a central influencing factor in perception and cognition, constitutively bound to its use in thought collectives.