What regional or language‑specific dog whistles have researchers identified outside the U.S. (e.g., Sweden’s ‘kulturberikare’)?
Executive summary
Researchers and commentators have documented a lively ecosystem of regional and language‑specific dog whistles outside the U.S., from coded numbers and emojis to culture‑specific slurs and neutral‑sounding words loaded with hidden meanings; these signals vary by country, platform and target audience and present acute detection problems for scholars and platforms [1] [2] [3]. Existing work stresses both concrete examples—such as the antisemitic “echo” usage linked to triple parentheses and the UK/US debates around “grooming”—and methodological limits: lexicons age fast and many signals operate pragmatically rather than semantically, making claims about intent contested [2] [1] [4].
1. How researchers define and classify non‑US dog whistles
Scholars treat dog whistles as coded expressions with dual meanings—benign to the majority but politicized for an ingroup—and classify them across semantic, pragmatic and contextual types, a taxonomy that helps explain why regional variants keep emerging and why detection remains difficult [3] [5] [4]. Academic projects that scrape social platforms show models can flag many recurrent tokens, yet they trade off precision for recall and struggle with context‑dependent signals that mean one thing in one country and another elsewhere [3].
2. Europe: words, numbers and platform codes
European cases discussed in the literature include neutral words repurposed as slurs or cues—researchers highlight “echo” as an ostensibly benign term tied to antisemitic usage that echoes the triple‑parentheses marker—and note that numerals and emojis also serve as cross‑border overt codes (the number 88 and other numeric memes are used by white‑supremacist networks) [2] [1]. The OUP blog and ACL paper emphasize that such tokens slip past moderation because they carry mundane senses while signaling to a niche audience, and journalists and academics disagree about whether some political phrases (e.g., charges of “financial speculators” in Italy) function as dog whistles or as rhetorical framing—showing conceptual debates persist [1] [6].
3. Country‑specific historical examples: Australia and beyond
Australia’s political history provided early impetus for the dog‑whistle concept: researchers point to campaigning by figures such as John Howard using words like “un‑Australian,” “mainstream” and “illegals” as coded appeals to anxieties about identity, illustrating how national vocabulary carries local resonance that other polities may not share [6]. Comparative scholars warn that similar phrases exist in other languages but must be documented in situ rather than assumed transferable, because cultural references and histories shape whether a phrase functions as covert signaling [6] [4].
4. The grooming debate and cross‑Anglosphere differences
“Grooming” illustrates how the same lexeme can be weaponized differently across countries: the OUP overview notes the term’s mainstream meaning (child‑abuse process) and its emergence as a dog whistle in both the UK and the US, but with distinct target audiences and political dynamics, underlining that regional uses of the same word can diverge sharply [1]. This tempts platforms to apply blanket rules, yet scholars show moderation and analysis require granular, context‑aware models [1] [3].
5. Detection limits, normative debates and open questions
Methodological work finds that curated lexicons and models can capture many recurring signals but fail on low‑frequency, context‑dependent cues; debates in the literature also ask whether some alleged dog whistles are genuinely coded appeals or simply political framing—an empirical and normative gap that researchers acknowledge [3] [4]. The available sources do not provide a comprehensive, authoritative catalog of every regional dog whistle (for example, the specific Swedish term mentioned in the query does not appear in the provided reporting), so claims about the full global inventory cannot be made from these materials alone [3] [6].
Conclusion
Contemporary research documents a patchwork of regional dog whistles—number codes, platform memes, locally loaded words and politically freighted phrases—while warning that identification depends on ethnographic grounding, robust datasets and careful theory because many signals are pragmatic, contested and rapidly evolving [1] [2] [4]. The corpus provided here maps key types and examples and flags persistent disagreements and detection challenges, but it falls short of an exhaustive international lexicon.