The present pilot study investigates spoken hate-speech items, produced by a professional German speaker after actual Twitter and Facebook posts and reflecting characteristic morpho-syntactic features of German hate speech. Acoustic-prosodic signal analyses reveal a considerable featurespecific variation in the production of hate speech. Thus, at least at the level of phonetics and spoken hate speech, no evidence was found that hate speech is a separate communicative function conveyed by a set of uniformly realized prosodic characteristics

Neitsch, Jana

Niebuhr, Oliver

English

Syddansk Universitets Forskerportal

       University of Southern DenmarkTypes of hate speech in German and their prosodic characteristicsNeitsch, Jana; Niebuhr, OliverPublished in:Proceedings 1st International Seminar on the Foundations of SpeechPublication date:2019Document version:Final published versionDocument license:CC BYCitation for pulished version (APA):Neitsch, J., & Niebuhr, O. (2019). Types of hate speech in German and their prosodic characteristics. InProceedings 1st International Seminar on the Foundations of Speech: Breathing, Pausing, and the Voice (pp.85-87). Syddansk Universitet. https://my.eventbuizz.com/assets/editorImages/1575286883-SEFOS_2019__proceedings_programme.pdfGo to publication entry in University of Southern Denmark's Research PortalTerms of useThis work is brought to you by the University of Southern Denmark.Unless otherwise specified it has been shared according to the terms for self-archiving.If no other license is stated, these terms apply:            • You may download this work for personal use only.            • You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain            • You may freely distribute the URL identifying this open access versionIf you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details and we will investigate your claim.Please direct all enquiries to puresupport@bib.sdu.dkDownload date: 23. Oct. 2025Types of hate speech in German and their prosodic characteristics Jana Neitsch1* and Oliver Niebuhr1 1Centre for Industrial Electronics, Mads Clausen Institute, University of Southern Denmark, Sønderborg/DK * neitsch@mci.sdu.dk The present pilot study investigates spoken hate-speech items, produced by a professional German speaker after actual Twitter and Facebook posts and reflecting characteristic morpho-syntactic features of German hate speech. Acoustic-prosodic signal analyses reveal a considerable feature-specific variation in the production of hate speech. Thus, at least at the level of phonetics and spoken hate speech, no evidence was found that hate speech is a separate communicative function conveyed by a set of uniformly realized prosodic characteristics. INTRODUCTION Hate speech is becoming more and more of a concern in societies around the world [1]. The term “hate speech”, however, remains highly controversial. There is a lack of consensus on its definition and impact, while the motiva-tion and justification for its criminalization and regula-tion are inextricably linked to allowing freedom of speech on the one hand and protecting the human rights of equality and dignity on the other [2].  Given the pressure that hate speech exerts on the pillars of modern civilization, it is striking how little is known about the linguistic and communicative mecha-nisms underlying the expression and perception of hate speech. The Velux-funded XPEROHS project is intended to address some of these gaps. The project is based on a large German-Danish corpus of about 3.5 million real instances (posts) of hate speech on Twitter and Facebook, see [3,4] for further details on the compiled corpus and the goals of the cross-linguistic project. The present study is concerned with the German subset of this corpus, which consists of ~1.7 million hate-speech posts.  Although hate speech is primarily associated with written language, at least in the way it is experienced and discussed in the media [5], there is, of course, also hate speech in spoken language, for example in political dis-course [6] or in connection with bullying on school yards and football fields [7]. The present study takes the first step into the field of spoken hate speech by asking the question, at an acoustic-phonetic level, whether hate speech has a uniform manifestation in the sense of a con-text-independent phonetic core and/or how large the phonetic variation of hate speech is with respect to major lexical and morpho-syntactic features that have emerged – for the German subset of the corpus – from a preceding linguistic processing of the Twitter and Facebook data.   For providing an empirical definition and scientific guidance in identifying and handling (e.g., reporting, deleting) hate speech, relatively or absolutely constant characteristics are required. At the level of speech com-munication, this would mean that phonetic parameters are not entirely shaped by the morpho-syntactic features underlying the functional and semantic variants of hate speech but also by the phenomenon of hate speech itself.  METHOD The acoustic-phonetic analysis conducted here is based on German hate speech. A set of 12 hate-speech items (posts) were selected from the German part of the Twitter and Facebook corpus. They were all similarly short. That is, they consist of less than 25 words and include between 20 and 30 syllables. Moreover, semantically they are all directed against the minority group of immigrants. Six items use the more general and relatively neutral term "Ausländer" (foreigners) to refer to this group, the other six use the more specific, religious and – in this context – negatively connoted term "Muslime" (Muslims). These 12 original hate-speech items have been modified or supplemented in terms of major lexical and morpho-syntactic features that crystallized as being characteristic of hate-speech items posted on Twitter and Facebook [3], thus leading to 6 feature conditions in addition to the original baseline condition: (1) rhetorical questions (RQs, e.g., "who wants/needs/would ever..."), (2) irony (IRO, modal particles expressing irony in Ger-man), (3) imperatives (IMP, directed either at the writer's peer group "we must..." or at the minority group "go/stop...."), (4) metaphors (MET, e.g., "Muslims are like..."), (5) holocaust reference (HOL), and (6) in-directness (IND e.g., "I am not against foreigners/ Muslims, but..."). In this way, 6 items sets have been created in addition to the original set. Thus, the total number of items was 84 (7x12). The 84 hate-speech items were evaluated by two independent groups of people, an expert panel of re-searchers working on hate speech and a panel of ordinary users of Twitter and Facebook. The 84 items passed this pre-test in that they were consistently identified as hate speech. Moreover, both experts and non-experts rated all items similarly as to the degree of expressed hate. The 84 items were realized, in line with [8], by a male native speaker of German (BP, 47 years old). He is a professional speaker as well as an experienced public-speaking trainer with an academic education and a PhD degree in phonetics and linguistics. BP is able to control the phonetic characteristics of his speech and to deliber-ately choose and produce phonetic patterns in order to create specific semantic-pragmatic effects.  85On this basis, BP received the instruction to fami-liarize himself thoroughly with the set of 84 separate items and to practice their elicitation with different phonetic realizations in order to find one that suits each individual item and makes it sound like authentic and natural spoken hate speech. Note that BP was not informed about the 7 feature conditions included in the 84 items and according to a debriefing interview, he also did not become aware of these conditions during the speech-production task. The speech-production task itself was conducted in the sound-proof booth of the Kiel Phonetics Lab [9]. Recordings were made with a Microtech Gefell M940 microphone at a 44.1 kHz sampling rate and a 16-bit quantization. BP produced the 84 items as isolated hate-speech utterances. The acoustic-phonetic analysis of the 84 items included two pitch (f0) parameters, i.e. f0 mean (Hz) and f0 range (semitones, st), as well as two voice-quality parameters, i.e. mean HNR (Harmonics-to-Noise Ratio measured in dB) and the Hammarberg index (dB). Loudness was included in terms of mean RMS intensity (dB). Duration and tempo parameters were excluded due to the items' different morpho-syntactic make-up. Analysis was done automatically by means of PRAAT scripts written by [10,11,12].  RESULTS Analyzed were 84 recorded stimuli that were produced by the phonetically trained speaker. Results were ana-lyzed for mean f0, HNR, Hammarberg Index, and f0 range. P-values were adjusted using the Benjamini-Hochberg correction [13] to account for the multiple variables that were tested. All statistical models showed significant interactions between target group (Muslims vs. foreigners) and all of the feature conditions (see above; all p-values < 0.03). Interactions were split up according to the two targets and compared against the original items. Results for foreigners indicate that RQ, IRO, IND, IMP, and HOL were realized with a signifi-cantly lower mean f0 than their original base items (all p-values < 0.04). For Muslims, IRO and HOL items were realized with a significantly lower mean f0 (all p-values < 0.0003), whereas IMP, IND and RQ were pro-duced with a higher mean f0, see Fig.1. HNR results for Muslims show significantly higher values compared to the original base items for all the feature conditions except for HOL (all p-values < 0.03), indicating less breathiness than in the original base items. For foreign-ers, IMP, IND and RQ were also produced with higher HNR values, indicating less breathiness than in the original base items (all p-values < 0.03). The Hammar-berg index yielded higher values for RQ and HOL and lower values for MET (all p-values < 0.03) when the minority group concerned were foreigners. For Muslims, all feature conditions had higher Hammarberg indices than the original base items (all p-values < 0.04; see Fig. 2). Finally, f0-range results indicate lower values for IMP, MET and RQ compared to original items (all p-values < 0.02) in the foreigner sub-set, but higher values in the Muslim subset (all p-values < 0.0003).  DISCUSSION A main result of our data is that items addressing the tar-get minority group of foreigners differ prosodically from those addressing target minority group of Muslims. In particular, the prosodic differences caused by the six fea-ture conditions compared to the original items were a lot more pronounced when the hate speech targeted Muslims rather than foreigners. That is, the communicative func-tions that were involved in the tested hate speech items and embodied by the six lexical and morpho-syntactic features were conveyed more clearly and consistently, i.e. with a greater phonetic effort, in Muslim-oriented speech. The greater phonetic effort includes a greater vocal effect, see the higher HNR and Hammarberg-index values for the Muslim items. This makes sense given that Muslims are a smaller, more specific and negatively con-noted target group than foreigners in general. A further implication of this finding is that the "intensity" of hate speech can vary at the phonetic level.   However, as was stated above, the nature of this variation points in the direction of a more or less strong signalling of the communicative functions (irony, rheto-rical questions, etc.) conveyed by the different feature conditions. For example, rhetorical questions turned out to be the condition that differed most in its prosodic characteristics from the original base items, which is plausible insofar as this communicative function is, un-like indirectness and holocaust reference, primarily con-veyed by means of prosody. The prosodic characteristics of rhetorical questions show such a coherent co-variation across speakers and contexts that researchers assume the existence of a 'prosodic construction' for this communi-cative function in the sense of a bundle of linked para-meters and settings [14]. The parameters and settings we find here for the realization of rhetorical questions in hate speech are in accord with those reported in [14].  The conclusions we can draw from these findings with respect to our research questions is that there is ob-viously no uniform, context-independent phonetic core pattern that characterizes hate speech (we have also test-ed other prosodic parameters with the same result). The opposite is true. The contextual variation of hate speech is substantial. The nature of this variation suggests that it is externally driven, i.e. due to signalling communicative functions that can be involved in hate speech, such as rhetorical questions. Unlike for the latter, we found no evidence for something like a separate 'prosodic con-struction' of hate speech. Of course, this conclusion is still very preliminary since the analyzed production data only relies on a single speaker (although his skills argue in favor of the generalization of the produced items), and since we still need to compare the different hate-speech conditions to a baseline condition of no hate speech from the same speaker. 86ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The XPEROHS project (project number 95-16416) was funded by the Velux Foundation. The authors would like to thank Benno Peters from Kiel University for recording the files for the purpose of the study. Please note that the speaker was chosen since he fulfilled the criteria (gender, age) of a prototypical hate speaker and is phonetically trained. Furthermore, we thank Andrea Kleene, Nicole Baumgarten, and Klaus Geyer for their discussions and support in conducting this study.   Fig. 1. Mean f0 levels across all feature conditions for the two target groups (foreigners and Muslims).  Fig. 2. Hammarberg index across all feature conditions for the two target groups (foreigners and Muslims). REFERENCES  [1] Guterres, A. (2019). United Nations Strategy and Plan of Action on Hate Speech. Taken from: https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/documents/UN%20Strategy%20and%20Plan%20of%20Action%20on%20Hate%20Speech%2018%20June%20SYNOPSIS.pdf [2] Herz, M., & Molnár, P. (Eds.). (2012). The content and context of hate speech: rethinking regulation and responses. Cambridge University Press. [3] Baumgarten, N., Bick, E., Geyer, K., Lund Iversen, D., Kleene, A., Lindø, A. V., Neitsch, J., Niebuhr, O., Nielsen, R. & Petersen, E. N. (Submitted). Towards Balance and Boundaries in Public Discourse: Expressing and Perceiving Online Hate Speech (XPEROHS). RASK – International journal of language and communication. [4]              XPEROHS Project. 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Questions as          prosodic configurations: How prosody and context shape          the multiparametric acoustic nature of rhetorical questions          in German. In Proceedings of the 19th International          Congress of Phonetic Sciences. 2425-2429.      80120160HOL IMP IND IRO MET RQ ORIGINALFeature ConditionsMean f0 TargetFOREIGNERSMOSLEMS15.017.520.022.525.0HOL IMP IND IRO MET RQ ORIGINALFeature ConditionsHammarberg indexTargetFOREIGNERSMOSLEMSFOREIGNERS  MUSLIMS FOREIGNERS  MUSLIMS 87

Types of hate speech in German and their prosodic characteristics

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Types of hate speech in German and their prosodic characteristics

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