Othering Practice in a Right-Wing Extremist Online Forum

This article investigates the linguistic-discursive construction of others in one international right-wing extremist online discussion forum. By means of a positioning analysis and an appraisal analysis, the article shows how reference to absent third parties is used to establish others as outgroups in forum posts aimed at an international audience. The analysis reveals an othering practice that links the online extremist discourse world with international and local as well as with political, social, and personal concerns, providing various opportunities for user affiliation. The results of this investigation contribute to understanding of the linguistic-discursive construction of online hate speech in multicultural virtual (rhetorical) communities; the study also highlights how social media and the use of English as a lingua franca combine to connect geographically and linguistically separate individuals and facilitate the globalization of extremist discourse through the construction of a shared discourse world online.