Brexitiness: The Ebbs and Flows of British Eurosceptic Rhetoric since 1945

The 2016 EU referendum has already left a lasting imprint on the English language. Building on previous research (e.g. Lalic-Krstin & Silaski 2018, Buckledee 2018), the present article integrates discourse-analytical and corpus-based methods to explore current developments and place them in the historical context of the past 70 years. Using the News on the Web (NoW) corpus, which covers the years from the run-up to the referendum to the present, I will show that Brexit discourse comprises not only the neologisms inspired by the event itself, but also a number of tropes such as ‘take/want (one’s) country back’, ‘take back control’, ‘(a truly) global Britain’, and more, most of which have developed from discourses of long historical standing. This history will be explored using the Hansard Corpus, which – despite caveats articulated by Mollin (2007) – has proved a valuable resource for the purpose at hand. The analysis will show that at various stages since 1945, Euroscepticism has meshed both with the rhetoric of the political left and the political right and that, ultimately, the UK’s position vis a vis Europe has been negotiated in the context of massive sociocultural transformations such as the dissolution of the British Empire and the European postwar economic boom. Pro-European sentiment, which reached its peak in the 1975 referendum endorsing membership in the European Economic Community, shows Britain having overcome the collective ‘phantom pain’ following the dissolution of the British Empire and the erosion of its position as a major world power. The break-up of this pro-European consensus has revealed cultural rifts in the UK which go deeper than the immediate political and economic context of the Brexit vote.


Introduction
The present article was inspired by the EU referendum of 2016 and is framed as a linguist's response to this historic event and its complex consequences, which we see unfolding three years later. I am encouraged in this endeavour by the fact that the role of language and discourse is regularly recognised as important in analyses of Brexit published by historians, legal experts, political scientists and journalists.
Topics dealt with range from the rhetorical strategies employed by 'Brexiters' and 'Remainers' (e.g. Katz, 2016;Armstrong, 2017;Clarke, Goodwin & Whiteley, 2017;Saunders, 2018) to the details of the legal framework in which English can continue to be used as the de facto working language of the European Union after March 2019, when its native-speaker base and constitutional status in the European Union will be reduced considerably -as the second official language of the Republic of Ireland and, alongside the national language Maltese, as one of the two official languages of Malta. 1 Given this widespread interest, an analysis of the language and discourse(s) of Brexit from a linguistic point of view will not only serve the discipline itself, but also hold some interest for neighbouring fields. For it to be comprehensive and systematic, such an analysis will have to meet the following two requirements.
(i) Synchronically, it should go beyond the lexicographical level (i.e. charting the origin and spread of referendum-inspired neologisms such as Brexit, brexity, to Brexit-proof). After all, Brexit-related discourses are characterised not only by the use of Brexit neologisms, but also by the many new ways in which existing words are combined or used. In this sense, phrases 1 See Ginsburgh, Moreno-Ternero & Weber 2017 and 2018. Obviously, this complication is more of a legal-technical issue than a practical one, and I expect experts to devise a solution recognising the inevitable continuing presence of English as the EU's main working language. In a global linguistic ecology in which English is the world's first choice as lingua franca in so many regions and communicative domains -in other words, the 'hub' of the World Language System (de Swaan 2002(de Swaan , 2010) -it will remain the most practical link between Latvia and Germany, Bulgaria and Denmark, or Spain and Finland -regardless of whether the UK is or is not a formal member of the 'bloc'. See Modiano (2017) and Seargeant (2017) for further analysis. (ii) Diachronically, a comprehensive Critical Discourse Analysis (henceforth CDA, cf. Fairclough, 2010[1995) of Brexit discourse must not confine itself to the present, but needs some historical time-depth (ca. 70 plus years, in the present case), as a historic event such as the June 2016 referendum cannot be interpreted without placing it in the wider historical context.
Methodologically, the present study will rely on the standard mix of quantitative and qualitative text-analytical methods which has been developed in corpus linguistics, the computer-aided analysis of large amounts of digital data. As an interdisciplinary effort, it additionally connects with research in two different but complementary traditions.
On the one hand, it builds on work in CDA, and more generally in cultural studies, which typically derives its insights from close readings of key documents, informed by a coherent critical theory of discourse and society. On the other hand, it reaches out to cultural analysis in the ' distant reading' (Moretti, 2013) mode pioneered in the Digital Humanities. No corpus-based discourse analysis of any socially or politically controversial topic is complete without the acknowledgement of the fact that in every society there are groups who exercise political power and agency without fully and openly articulating their motives in mainstream public forums. Such absence from public discourse may be voluntary, when people prefer to keep their agendas secret, or involuntary, when people lack the competences necessary for access to the relevant channels of communication or have their access blocked or restricted by others. In the case of the EU referendum, this fact manifested itself in frequent allegations that Brexit discourses showed all sorts of biases: an expert bias -the political, economic and cultural elites against the common sense of the ordinary voter; a class bias -the middle class against the working class; a London bias -the cosmopolitan and diverse capital against the rest of England; and a regional bias within the UK -England and Wales against Scotland and Northern Ireland. To compensate for possible biases of this kind, discourse analysis must be sensitive not only towards expressed content and the linguistic form in which it is expressed, but also towards silences and taboos.
Section 2 below will present an analysis of the immediate linguistic fall-out from the EU referendum, while section 3 will complement this with a longer-term discourse-historical study based on the Hansard parliamentary record from 1803 to 2005 and selected further documents. 2 As will be shown, since 1945 Europe has rapidly and massively superseded the Empire and the Commonwealth as the major arena in which the UK has defined its transnational connections. The concluding section will summarise the major findings, pointing out their potential relevance to neighbouring fields, such as history and cultural studies. The analysis will show that at various stages in the developments since 1945 Euroscepticism has meshed both with the rhetoric of the political left and the political right and that, ultimately, the UK's position vis à vis Europe has been negotiated in the context of massive sociocultural transformations such as the dissolution of the British Empire and the postwar economic boom.

The language of Brexit: neologisms and beyond
With regard to the linguistic impact of Brexit, attention was initially focused on vocabulary and terminology (e.g., Katz, 2016;Fontaine, 2017;Lalić-Krstin & Silaški, 2018;Pullum, 2018). More recently, this research has been complemented by publications taking a wider, discourse-analytical approach (e.g. Buckledee, 2018;Koller, Kopf & Miglbauer, 2019;Zappettini & Krzyżanowski, 2019). While some of these studies use linguistic corpora, often customised small ones assembled for the purposes at hand, or at least work with digital textual data, comprehensive and systematic statistical profiling of large masses of text has not generally played a major role so far. The present study will go beyond previous lexicographical and discourse-analytical research on Brexit in two ways.
First, its targeted list of 'Brexit words' is made up not only of neologisms, but also of novel uses and combinations of existing words. Secondly, it integrates quantitative methods from corpus linguistics and qualitative methods from discourse analysis, partly inspired by CDA. This mixed-methods approach, exploiting the obvious 2 While I value the research carried out by Wodak and collaborators in the framework of their 'Discourse-Historical Approach' (DHA, Reisigl & Wodak 2015), I use the term discourse-historical in its non-technical descriptive sense here.
Mair: Brexitiness 5 synergies between the critical ' close reading' of individual texts in CDA and the ' distant reading' (Moretti, 2013) of large masses of relevant textual data, has already been used successfully in the study of the linguistic fall-out from a number of other social controversies (cf., e.g., Baker, 2006;Gabrielatos, McEnery, Diggle & Baker, 2012;Baker, Gabrielatos, KhosraviNik, Krzyżanowski, McEnery & Wodak, 2008;Germond, McEnery & Marchi, 2016;Baker, Brezina & McEnery, 2017), though not of the Brexit process. The primary databases for the present study are the News on the Web (NoW) corpus, which will be used to explore the immediate linguistic changes caused by Brexit, and the Hansard Corpus, which will serve to explore the longer-term history of Eurosceptic discourses in Britain. NoW (Davies, 2013) is a regularly updated 'monitor' corpus covering the years since 2010 and currently comprising ca. 8.1 billion words of running text.
This period spans the crucial years from the run-up to the referendum to the present. Analyses of the data show that Brexit discourse comprises not only the neologisms inspired by the process itself, but also a large number of tropes such as take/want (one's) country back, take back control, (a truly) global Britain, and more, most of which have developed from discourses of long historical standing. This history will be explored using the Hansard Corpus of British parliamentary debates. The 'Hansard' (named after the publisher and entrepreneur Thomas Hansard, who helped start the venture in the early nineteenth century) is the official record of British parliamentary debates and decisions, now available in print and 3 Born-digital data play a minor role in the present study. As it aims at historical time-depth, it had to be based on digital versions of traditional text-types, such as the Hansard parliamentary transcripts and online newspapers and magazines. However, it is self-evident that social media have played such a central role in events that no analysis of Brexit discourses would be complete without them. ac.uk/schools/critical/research/fundedresearchprojects/samuels/). 4 The word Brexit, a blend of Britain/British and exit -modelled on an earlier coinage Grexit, which was used informally to refer to a possible exit of Greece from the Eurozone as a result of its sovereign debt crisis -was apparently first used in 2010 (Armstrong, 2017: 1-2;Fontaine, 2017), but remained rare until 2016, when it emerged as the most popular term to refer to the phenomenon in the months before and after the June referendum. This rise to prominence -and permanence -was recognised by the publication of a separate entry for the word in the March 2017 In the NoW corpus, the word Brexit is sporadically attested from 2010. The upper half of Figure 1 below shows it expectedly shooting to prominence during the first half of 2016, which is therefore analysed in ' close-up', by periods of ten days, in the lower half.
The crucial measure here is the normalised frequency per million words, which rose from <100 to 440.74 in the 10-day period encompassing the 23 June referendum (see rightmost bar in the lower chart). This topical spike is temporary, but frequency of use has remained high.
'Wildcard' searches (for Brexit*, i.e. the root Brexit and any sequence of characters following it) show that the word almost instantly gave rise to numerous derivations, among them the frequent Brexiteer(s), the less common Brexiter(s), fairly common transparent combinations such as Brexit-related, Brexit-induced, Brexit-obsessed, Brexit-battered or Brexit-supporting, but also a long tail comprising dozens of rarer forms such as the verb to Brexit/brexit (i.e. 'to exit from the EU', but also found in a number of phrasal combinations such as 'we're all brexited out'; see also Lutzky & Kehoe, 2019), Brexit-proof (attested both as an adjective and as a verb), brexity, Brexit-ready, Brexitland, Brexitannia, Brexit-lite, brexitise, Brexitism, etc. In cases of direct competition among neologisms, it is often the more expressive and emotionally charged terms which win out, lending credence to the fact that the 'EU question has become more polarized ideologically in Britain than anywhere else in Europe' (Tombs, 2016). Thus, in the period between January 2010 and December 2018 the term Brexiteer, with its activist connotations (cf. musketeer, volunteer, buccaneer, This assessment is echoed in several contributions to Goodbye Europe, an anthology collecting public figures', writers' and intellectuals' responses to the 2016 referendum.
Here is an example from the contribution by author Kate Eberlen: Is it a sense of humour failure to object to the term 'Remoaner'? It's a word that comes from our exuberant tradition of tabloid puns. Even if you disagree with the politics, you admire the verbal dexterity. But is it really clever or amusing to belittle the passionately held views of so many people?
(2017: 75) As a final illustration of a direct Brexit-induced neologism, consider the adjective brexity, which has inspired the title of the present article and which denotes a person or mindset strongly favouring and actively encouraging the UK's exit from the EU.
In terms of context-free derivational morphology, the adjective brexity has the broad meaning potential of 'having to do with Brexit', which is emotionally neutral. This meaning is occasionally attested in the data, for instance in example (1) below: would be highly unlikely for chaotic Brexit to emerge as the default term a mere two years after a majority of the electorate voted for Brexit -out of a sense of frustration with the status quo, but also with conviction and hopes for the future. Other Brexit-related tropes, however, seem to have left a more lasting impact.  This perfectly ordinary phrase -little used up to 2016, when one of its variants, the imperative Vote Leave, take back control, became the slogan of the Leave campaign -shot to prominence with the referendum, but unlike strong and stable, has come to stay. Note that it is precisely this phrase that is singled out for representation in a long litany of changes pervading Brexit Britain in Ali Smith's topical novel Autumn: All across the country, the media was insane. All across the country, politicians lied. All across the country, politicians fell apart. All across the country, promises vanished. All across the country, money vanished. All across the country, social media did the job. All across the country, nobody spoke about it. All across the country, nobody spoke about anything else. All across the country, racist bile was general. All across the country, people said it wasn't that they didn't like immigrants. All across the country, people said it was about control. (Smith, 2016 In sum, the veritable explosion of lexical creativity in the wake of the EU referendum should be read as a sign that the responses to the result were not exclusively rooted in rational analyses of the political and economic factors guiding voters' choices. Rather, they reveal a deeper emotional and cultural stratum, as is recognised by Robert Eaglestone: Brexit is not only political, economic and administrative: perhaps most significantly it is an event in culture, too. Brexit grew from cultural beliefs, real or imaginary, about Europe and the UK; the arguments before, during and after the referendum were -and are -arguments about culture; its impact on the cultural life of these islands may last for generations. (2018: 1) It is these cultural roots of a complex and sometimes fraught relationship with Europe that will be explored in the longer historical term in the following section.

Europe First? The UK's geopolitical position as reflected in Hansard
In spite of a temporary setback caused by the American War of Independence, Britain managed to systematically assemble and consolidate from the late 18 th century what was to become the largest colonial Empire the world had ever seen. Unsurprisingly, despite geographical proximity, Britain's European entanglements were not always a priority during this period. The following lexicostatistical profile of the 1803-2005 digital Hansard record is an attempt to document the relative prominence of the Empire (and, subsequently, the Commonwealth) and Europe as political topics in UK parliamentary debates. 8 In a thorough and thoughtful assessment of data authenticity and quality, Mollin (2007) has discussed both the high potential and the many limitations of this source for historical linguistic and discourse studies.
Fortunately, for content-word searches of the type undertaken here, the potential clearly outweighs the limitations, so that the findings can be expected to be generally robust. For the topic of the (British) Empire, the words Empire and imperial were taken as the central pointers (searches being case-insensitive in both cases).
For the topic of the Commonwealth, it was decided to search upper-case and lowercase mentions so as not to miss potentially interesting borderline cases between the common-noun and proper-noun senses. It was somewhat more difficult to cast the 'wordnet' for mentions of the topic of Europe. In the end, the results were calculated from the following individual searches (case-insensitive): analysed amounts to a total of 1.6 billion words. As periods contain different amounts of text, normalised frequencies are calculated per million words, as was done in the case of the NoW corpus. Figure 4 gives frequencies for the entire 202 years of coverage, for a first general orientation. 9 This made possible identification of passages in which the politics of the currency were in focus.
No search was carried out for the symbol €, which was deemed of lesser interest as it was rare and generally restricted to identifying sums of money. 10 Labour Peer Dr John Gilbert in the House of Lords on 24 November 2004. 11 One of the anonymous reviewers for this article asked whether the high frequency of the word Europe itself may not skew the findings in critical ways. This is not the case. Before the emergence of the highly productive combining form Euro-in the 1960s and 1970s there is stability in the sense that the three high-frequency items Europe, European and Europeans make up almost the entire totals, so that the trough for 'Euro words' in the heyday of the Empire in the late 19 th and early 20 th centuries reflects a real decline in the number of references to the topic. By the 1970s, the share of the word Europe is no longer as critical, as it never accounts for more than a third of all occurrences. At normalised rates, What we see here is the demise of Empire, the rise and fall of the Commonwealth as a topic and the steep increase in Euro-words throughout the 1960s and 1970s.
Note in particular that Europe and the Commonwealth were equally strongly represented as topics of parliamentary concern during the 1960s, but Europe  (Benn, 2016(Benn, [1975). Sentimentality, let alone sentimentality about imperial and Commonwealth connections, was not involved.
This had been different a dozen years before, in the case of another Labour Eurosceptic, Hugh Gaitskell, who shortly before his death in 1963 came out firmly against European integration in an impassioned speech (Gaitskell, 1962). To give an impression of the period flair of this speech, I quote the opening lines of the anti- widespread among sectors of the electorate. A disconnect between official political, media and expert discourse on immigration, with its emphasis on the cultural and economic dynamism likely to be unleashed by a growing and diverse population, and deep-seated fears and resentments among people untouched by this prospect, may well turn out to have been one of the discursive silences, breakdowns and taboos mentioned in the introduction above.
As a linguist, I would like to point out the obvious, but frequently overlooked role of the English language in directing currents of migration, in Europe as well as in the world at large. Given the role of English as the global lingua franca, some level of competence in English can be expected among migrants starting out anywhere in the world, and the English language thus also works as a pull factor among migrants in the European context (cf. also Adserà & Pytliková 2015, with extensive documentation with statistics from the OECD countries). Britain, Germany and Finland may offer comparable economic prospects for migrants, but with free movement among citizens within the European Union, Britain may often turn out to be the destination of choice, because migrants already have the necessary level of language competence in English, whereas they would be held back by lack of competence in German or Finnish.
The outlook from the present analysis must be muted. For Europe, the likely departure of the UK is a major political, economic and -not least -cultural loss.
In Britain, the 2016 referendum has revealed a 'Divided Kingdom' -divided by differences in emphasis on national autonomy and sovereignty and different attitudes towards the desirability of supra-national integration. In negotiating the new relationship between the UK and the EU, the elephant in the room is contemporary economic and cultural globalisation (a term which should definitely be investigated once the Hansard corpus has extended coverage to the present). Brexit will put up new obstacles for the movement of goods, capital and people between the UK and the European continent. This will directly affect the cultural sector -whether it is the trade in books or the organisation of musical and dramatic stage performances by European artists in the UK, or vice versa. It is to be hoped that, not least because of the continuing role of the English language as the world's and Europe's lingua franca, the impact of Brexit on intellectual debate and the free exchange of ideas will remain limited.

Competing Interests
The author has no competing interests to declare.