Document Type

Book Chapter

Publication Date

2025

DOI

10.1515/9783111434018-017

Publication Title

Exploring digitally-mediated communication with corpora: Methods, analyses, and corpus construction

Pages

395-420

Abstract

In 2023, the U.S. Surgeon General warned the public of the current “loneliness epidemic” and its potential consequences on physical and mental health. One possible consequence of this epidemic is the growth of a movement defined by loneliness and isolation: the incel (“involuntary celibate”) movement. This warning presents a worrying glimpse at the future, as the incel movement, along with other parts of the manosphere, is one that espouses violently misogynist rhetoric which is intrinsically linked to right-wing extremism. While linguistic studies have been conducted on the speech of incels and other constituent movements of the manosphere, few of these studies look at the language of these communities from a cross-cultural and cross-linguistic perspective. To address this gap, we have created CoDEC-M, a subcorpus of the Corpus of Digital Extremism and Conspiracies (CoDEC). CoDEC is an open-source, open-access corpus made up of several subcorpora documenting different online spaces where extremists and conspiracy theorists gather. CoDEC-M is our response to the growing interest in the manosphere and the gap in scientific knowledge on the language used in its non-English speaking communities. In this paper, we use the text analysis software Sketch Engine to compare the top twenty keywords and bigrams in the English and Russian sections of CoDEC-M ranked by their keyness score. In doing so, we have uncovered evidence of language transfer between these two segments of the manosphere via direct borrowings from English into Russian and thematic overlap between keywords and bigrams that refer to gender, dating, and physical appearance. We have also uncovered and define a number of neologisms unique to each dataset and examine the real-world impact of the manosphere in English- and Russian-speaking countries in support of our argument that non-Anglo portions of the manosphere warrant further analysis.

Rights

© 2025 with the authors.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) License.

ORCID

0009-0009-1936-7674 (Drylie)

Original Publication Citation

McCullough, R., Drylie, D., Barta, M., Dykeman, C., & Smith, D. (2025). CoDEC-M: The multi-lingual manosphere subcorpus of the Corpus of Digital Extremism and Conspiracies. In L. Cotgrove, L. Herzberg, H. Lungen (Eds.), Exploring digitally-mediated communication with corpora: Methods, analyses, and corpus construction (pp. 395-420). De Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111434018-017

Download

Share

COinS