Paul Baker recounts the story of Polari with skill, erudition and tenderness.

How do violent jihadists use language to try to persuade people to carry out violent acts? This book analyses over two million words of texts produced by violent jihadists to identify and examine the linguistic strategies employed. Taking a mixed methods approach, the authors combine quantitative methods from corpus linguistics, which allow the identification of frequent words and phrases, alongside close reading of texts via discourse analyses. The analysis compares language use across three sets of texts: those which advocate violence, those which take a hostile but non-violent standpoint,...