LANGUAGE, experience and history: 'What happened' in World War II

Sociolinguistics can contribute to our understanding of history by showing how language helps to develop and maintain a sense of a communal past. This paper focuses on the referring terms for the World War II experiences of European Jews and of Japanese Americans, as evinced through various sources of public discourse (newspapers, library cataloguing systems, book titles). The analysis of linguistic form and function combines with discussion of the social and cultural history of Holocaust awareness in the U.S. to show how the word Holocaust (as a referring term for the experience of European Jews) became part of an American lexicon. A comparison of this stable term with the variety of nouns and verbal expressions used to index the Japanese American experience allows us to more fully consider how language helps to create and preserve collective memory.