JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

The complexity and variation of language about tobacco products and tobacco use is known to impact the understanding of related risks and influence behaviours such as smoking uptake and cessation. Transnational tobacco companies can leverage these complexities to alter the acceptability of product use, public understanding of risk and ultimately impact tobacco use behaviours. Variations in the language used by different groups are therefore an important avenue from which to explore tobacco use cultures and narratives. This paper examines the linguistic landscape of tobacco use, specifically smoking, across a sample of health organisations, the tobacco industry and in "general English".

Objective:

The aim is to identify variations in language practices and assess their implications for public health.

Methods:

We queried four corpora from three different groups; two of these corpora were pre-existing corpora of general English in the UK and US. The remaining two corpora sampled documents from two transnational tobacco companies, and UK and international organisations with a health focus. We used corpus linguistic software to identify similarities and differences in the characterisations of tobacco users ("smokers") and tobacco use behaviours ("smoking") between these groups.

Results:

Frequency and collocation analysis revealed a high degree of variation in the use of smoker* N* and smok* V* between groups. The tobacco industry corpus showed the fewest forms of smoker-specific categorisation, highlighting smokers as consumers and players in legal disputes. General English corpora had the highest variance of smoker-specific categorisations.

Conclusions:

There was high degree of confluence in terminology between corpora, but common categorisations in each corpus were highly variable, demonstrating that there is very little shared language between groups when smokers and smoking are described. This language variance highlights informational asymmetries and suggests ways to counter narratives that are misleading.