This study examines how intercultural empathy and related affiliative practices are expressed in English-dominant TikTok comment threads responding to experiences in Thailand. Drawing on a corpus of 2,507 publicly accessible comments from 50 videos, it investigates (1) how users display empathy and affective alignment, (2) which linguistic, multimodal, and pragmatic resources they use, and (3) how these practices index Thai relational values and shape public representations of Thailand. Using a discourse-pragmatic framework, the study distinguishes among empathy, ambient affiliation, and positive evaluation, and identifies three recurrent empathic practices: affective resonance, supportive stance-taking, and personal narrative sharing. The analysis shows that commenters build alignment through brief English expressions, Thai pragmatic particles embedded in English, emoji, orthographic intensification, and moral framing linked to Thai relational values. Many Thai commenters draw on 'nam jai' (generous and other-oriented care), hospitality, and family-like belonging, while many international commenters interpret these cues as signs of warmth, safety, and kindness. By showing how commenters use these resources to build solidarity in public, the study extends ELF research beyond intelligibility to affective relational work. Taken together, the findings show how empathy and cultural values are jointly shaped in these TikTok threads and suggest how similar processes may operate in other digital contexts.
Rutthaphak Huttayavilaiphan (Tue,) studied this question.