Ben Braber – författare

This book reviews changes in attitudes to immigrants in Britain and the language that was used to put these feelings into words between 1841 and 1921. Using a historical and linguistic method for an analysis of so far for this purpose relatively unused primary sources, it offers novel findings. It has found that changes in the meaning and use of the word alien in Britain coincided during the period between 1841 and 1921 with the expression of changing attitudes to immigrants in this country and the modification of the British variant of the English language. When people in Britain in these years used the term ‘an alien’, they meant most likely a foreigner, stranger, refugee or immigrant. In 1841 an alien denoted a foreigner or a stranger, notably a person residing or working in a country who did not have the nationality or citizenship of that country. However, by 1921 an alien mainly signified an immigrant in Britain – a term which, as this book shows, had in the course of the years since 1841 acquired very negative connotations.

•This book reviews changes in attitudes towards immigrants in Britain and the language that was used to put these feelings into words between 1921 and 2021. It analyses in what context attitudes were articulated and where they came from. To determine what was specifically British, it makes international comparisons.• It applies a historical and linguistic method for an analysis of so far relatively unused primary sources. It also explores secondary resources and, to provisde context, engages with the existing literature that deals with immigration but is not focused on attitudes or not always covers the entire period after 1921, and links post-1921 developments to what was set in motion before 1921 to sketch a long history that runs into the present.• The linguistic historical approach applied in this book brings it all together for the first time. It discovers when and how attitudes to immigrants in Britain changed after 1921, where they originated and what language was used to voice these attitudes, in particular specific words, their meanings, the under- or overtones they bore, and what people meant or felt when they used them.