Are “Gypsies” less adaptable than “Roma”? – A pilot study on collocations for the Czech words Cikán and Rom in modern newspaper and magazine texts

The purpose of this study is to explore the linguistic Othering of Roma people in a large corpus of modern newspaper and magazine texts in Czech. The texts that form the basis of the chosen corpus are taken from the Czech Republic’s largest daily newspapers and some of the largest magazines, which have sizable readerships. Answers to my hypotheses and questions about adjectives are given from a purely statistical perspective. Although more negative than positive adjectives are found before both studied terms – Rom and Cikán, many are neutral or stereotypically neutral. This study demonstrates how corpus linguistics can contribute to research into Othering, since the method used provides results from a substantial amount of basic data. The results are in line with previous research, and confirm it by means of an analysis of a large amount of data.