The Language of Online Intercultural Community Formation

This article examines how linguistic interaction patterns changed over time among a geographically and ethnically diverse group of young people in an online virtual community, the Junior Summit '98 online youth forum. The tools of word frequency and content analyses are paired with evidence from post-hoc interviews. Results demonstrate the ways in which these young people from different cultural, linguistic, and socio-economic backgrounds increasingly constituted themselves as a community, speaking in the collective voice, converging on a linguistic style, and concurring on the topics of conversation, the goals of the group, and strategies for achieving them.