The European Commission against Racism and Intolerance states that hate speech ‘poses grave dangers for the cohesion of a democratic society, the protection of human rights and the rule of law’. In hate speech, human dignity is violated through the use of dehumanising communicative means and through the tendency to rank people in hierarchies, in which some groups are considered more and others less worthy. In this chapter, I shall argue that critical linguistic awareness is a useful tool in combatting hate speech. The theoretical contribution is a linguistically based definition of hate speech, drawing on concepts from speech act theory, social semiotics and multimodality. The aim of this chapter is twofold: to enhance language activists’ and the general public’s understanding of the way hate speech is performed through communicative means and to provide activists with an analytic tool to cultivate critical linguistic awareness about hate speech.