Abstract

The media represent a good channel for shaping and transmitting representations of society, representations that uphold the current values and opinions, influencing people’s beliefs and views. Starting from this idea and having in view the fact that, in the last decades, Gypsies have become a frequent topic of the news (at least) in Europe, the present paper has two aims: (1) to analyse the manner in which Gypsies’ marginality (which seems to be perennial) is linguistically constructed in some English newspapers headlines and (2) to depict the influence of these headlines upon newspaper readers’ beliefs regarding Gypsies. The research tools used included an analysis of some newspapers headlines and a survey based on these headlines.