Hate Speech: the Phenomenon of Offensive Language

A characteristic inherent in a democratic State is a guarantee of freedom of opinion and expression by every citizen. However, the space for freedom cannot be misused to express various ideas or views so that it becomes a tool to attack human rights and the freedom of others manifested in the form of hate speech. Acts of hate speech are currently getting more and more attention from various circles, not only for law enforcers and practitioners, politicians, information and communication technology experts. But it is also a very serious concern for the Indonesian government to form and give birth to regulations concerning to handling of hate speech. Moreover, caring for diversity and harmonization in diversity in the era of globalization of information technology is the biggest challenge today. In this study, phenomenology is used as research design whereas purposive sampling from online media is used to collect the data. The aim is to maintain unity in the midst of a multicultural community life such as Batu Bara. On the other hand, the emergence of discussions about hate speech actually gave the object of a new study for linguistics. Based on the linguistic perspective, hate speech is a phenomenon of offensive language that can present linguistic data and can be analyzed linguistically. Therefore, this article conceptually describes the role of linguistics and linguists in understanding and explaining the subject of hate speech.     Keywords: Hate speech, speech acts, offensive, languag