Akadēmiskais centrshttps://doi.org/10.22364/lmahc.fd.24.07 | 77-107 | PDF
Verwendung der Bezeichnungen für Demenz in deutschen und litauischen Medien
(Use of the Terms for Dementia in German and Lithuanian Media)
Ariana Burmistrova, Vaiva Žeimantienė
Vilnius University
The subject of this chapter concerns a syndrome called dementia, in which the cognitive function, i.e. the ability to think, is impaired. With the changing social and demographic situation in the world and the growing number of older people, dementia has become one of the most acute problems of our time. The aim of the study is to show how dementia-related terms are used in the German and Lithuanian media and to discuss what terms, used in reference to people having dementia, should be preferred to avoid negative emotions in communication. The empirical study is based on the lists of (non-)recommended dementia-related terms collected from German and Lithuanian language guidelines for communication on dementia topics. The use of these terms is analysed in a corpus of 110 media articles (55 in Lithuanian and 55 in German) on dementia published between 2016 and 2022. The following news portals were used to download the articles: delfi.lt, 15min.lt, lrytas.lt and alfa.lt for the Lithuanian material and FAZ.net, Sueddeutsche.de and Zeit.de for German. The articles cover a variety of texts and share the common theme of dementia. The analysis was carried out using the AntConc tool to retrieve frequencies of recommended and non-recommended words and word combinations on dementia. The results of the analysis are presented in the form of charts and tables. The analysis shows that both in Lithuanian and German articles, the most frequent words and phrases are those that are recommended for use in dementia-related communication, whereas not recommended expressions are very few.
Keywords: dementia-related terms, media texts, guidelines for the communication about dementia, German, Lithuanian
From: Balode, Ineta; Lele-Rozentāle, Dzintra; Priede, Zanda (compilers and scientific editors). Linguistic and Medical Aspects in Health Care. Focus on Dementia. Riga: University of Latvia Press, 2024.