The radicalisation process of the 17-A terrorist cell, or how extremism can leave its mark on language

Abstract

In August 2017, a group of young people from Ripoll, known as the 17-A cell, carried out two terrorist attacks in Barcelona and Cambrils, Spain, resulting in the deaths of 16 people and leaving over a hundred injured. In an attempt to understand what happened and, more importantly, how it came to be, this research explores the verbal conduct of this terrorist cell through the texts found on their computers and mobile devices. Adopting a corpus-based discourse analysis perspective, our primary objective is to determine the discursive characteristics of these individuals. Our interest lies not only in what they say, to whom they address, who they speak about, and what reactions can be inferred, but also, and especially, in how they express themselves. Here, we present the results of an initially inductive approach to the data. To gain an overview of the materials self-produced by the cell, we have utilised one of the essential tools in corpus linguistics: keyword analysis; the later has been applied to various forms of communication, including audio files, short messages and WhatsApp conversations.