A comparative corpus study of race and Rasse

Beyond the context of cross-cultural pragmatics, it has been claimed that race and Rasse are not equivalent terms. The current paper seeks to establish the first known program of study to shed light on the extent to which race and Rasse differ. Corpora of US and German newspapers are used in this paper to sample mainstream race talk in the respective countries, and top collocates are analyzed along with a selection of examples. What is seen is that, while the historical context of slavery and the civil rights movement in the US and Nazism in Germany do seem to be reflected in the respective corpora, it is not so clear that the underlying meaning of race and Rasse are as different as some have claimed.