Cultural Categorizations of Men in a Notorious Online Community

This paper applies Cultural-Linguistic theory in the study of the language and underlying conceptualizations within an online community of some notoriety – namely, the incel community. It is well known that this community has developed its own lingo which serves to enables members to express conceptualizations from their worldview. Drawing on data from a corpus compiled from online fora and message-boards associated with this community, this study explores patterns of language use that reflect underlying patterns of socio-cultural categorization of men. Treating the incel community as a cultural group, and their specific use of linguistic resources within incel lingo as expressors of cultural conceptualizations this study is, in recognition of the truly interdisciplinary nature of Cultural Linguistics, intended as a contribution to Cultural Linguistics, Internet linguistics and corpus linguistics.