The language of Islamic extremism

Abstract

Recent studies have sought to understand individuals' motivations for terrorism through terrorist material content. To date, these studies have not capitalised on automated language analysis techniques, partictilarly those of corpus linguistics. In this paper, we demonstrate how applying three corpus-linguistic techniques to extremist statements can provide insights into their ideology. Our data consisted of 250 statements (approximately 500,000 words) promoting terrorist violence. Using the online software tool WMatrix, we submitted these data to frequency count, key word and key concept, and concordance analyses. Results showed that authors centre their rhetoric on themes of morality, social proof, inspiration and appeals to religion, and refer to the world via contrasting concepts, suggesting a polarised way of thinking compared to a general population usage. Additionally, we show how collocation can aid the establishment of networks between people and places. We discuss how such analyses might support the formtilation of evidence based counter-terrorism strategies.

Differentiating Act from Ideology: Evidence from Messages For and Against Violent Extremism

“…This was true both in the overall analysis of the concept frequencies across the three corpora and when we exposed the qualitative differences among the corpora. Compared to the U.K. officials’ counter‐messages, the Muslim authors’ counter‐messages showed (at both the word and concept level) similar use of religious terminology, similar use of stereotypical extremist language, and equivalent ways of using “contrastive” concepts (Prentice, Rayson, & Taylor, in press) when discussing religion, ethics, and language. These similarities give some evidence of a shared value system between Muslim extremist and counter‐extremist authors (Galtung, 1967).…”

Ideology through sentiment analysis: A changing perspective on Russia and Islam in NYT

“…Some of the issues discussed so far have been addressed in corpus-assisted discourse studies, which incorporated corpus linguistics methodology and (semi)automated text analysis techniques (Baker, 2006;Baker et al, 2008;Krishnamurty, 1996;Prentice et al, 2012;Taylor, 2014). For example, Krishnamurty's (1996) study of the nearsynonyms ethnic, racial, and tribal demonstrated the value of combining qualitative analysis of small text samples with automated analysis of large corpora.…”

8. Corpus linguistics and discourse analysis

“…He analyses a corpus of messages sent to the Teenage Health Freak website through which young people can receive health advice. Prentice, Rayson and Taylor (2012) analyse features of the language of Islamic extremism. For this purpose they collected a corpus containing 250 extremist texts downloaded from the Internet.…”