1.	Ethnic group, ethnicity

2.	Ethnic majority/minority

3.	Reflection in language

3.1	Negative labeling

3.2	Negative connotation

3.3	Reclamation

3.4	Political correctness

3.5

Negro

3.6

Nigger

3.7

Colored

3.8

Black

3.9	African-American

"While analyzing how the phenomenon of ethnicity is reflected in language (or discourse) we can notice many ways how the ethnic majority groups distinguish themselves from the minorities, and through the angles of telling on ethnic groups they can strongly influence the perception of minorities.
The most obvious is the opposition of “us” and “them” (the “not-us”), that is the “dominant group” and the “others” (the ethnic minorities). We can notice it especially in politics, more precisely in the discourse of nationalist parties, who want to separate the dominant group from “others” (which means in most cases the immigrants) and they use “us” to express various assumptions on behalf of the dominant group, to include their members, and to make the opposition between “us” and “them”, the immigrants, more evident and thus make the “others” more different, even dangerous, threatening the “us” and “our” well-being.
There are also negative collocations concerning ethnic minorities used to create negative associations towards subordinate groups, to intensify the threatening social stereotypes. We can call it “negative labeling ”.
The negative labeling can be used for example in racist terminology, to signal the “otherness” of certain ethnicity (which is in this case primarily different by the skin color), and especially to make this ethnicity powerless and thus increase even more the power of ethnic majority.
Words can acquire either positive or negative connotations in accordance with the intention of people and what was simply indicative at first then represented a strong attitude and finally it could develop into derogative or racially tinted expressions. That shows us that time is also important discriminating element, as it can either add the negative connotation to once neutral term, either “de-connote” the words, to convert their meaning so that they lose the negative connotation.
To cope with this discrimination and to reduce this negative effect through language the minority groups sometimes use “reclamation”, which means using the derogatory labeling themselves for positive marking of group identity. (This can be demonstrated p.e. on the term “nigger”, that will be analyzed later.)
Another marker of ethnic identity can be the use of language. Minority groups tend to maintain their mother tongue, which is negatively accepted by the dominant culture that wants the minority groups to be integrated into the dominant group (that is to say “not different”), which means to speak the same language as the majority. And as the language is related to culture as well, it is even more discriminating for ethnic minorities to be pushed to abandon their language as it means as well to abandon their culture."