The 6th European Conference of the International Association for Forensic and Legal Linguistics (IAFLL 2026) was hosted by the University of Montpellier Paul Valéry, at its Saint Charles campus in Southern France, from Monday 22 to Thursday 25 June 2026. The conference theme was: “Language, Power, Justice: Contemporary Issues in Legal and Forensic Linguistics.” ARENAS consortium members Ana Yara Postigo Fuentes and Julien Longhi presented some of their latest research, Forensic-Linguistic Mapping of Extremist Narratives in French Political Discourse.
The abstract of their paper explains that this article takes a forensic linguistics approach to analysing the extremist narratives that circulated on the X Platform in France between May and August 2024, a period marked by the European elections and the Olympic Games in Paris. From the ARENAS dataset, we examine how right-wing extremist narratives about immigration emerge, evolve, and move towards the discourse through rhetorical mitigation processes and varying degrees of explicitness.
We understand Extremist Narratives as systems of production of meaning that construct rigid divisions between groups and propose solutions with different levels of potential for damage. Our analysis focuses on the middle zone where the discourse is still apparently acceptable, but codifies in a way that forms increasingly exclusionary or punitive positions, becoming relevant from the forensic and legal point of view. By tracing how the extremist semantics are softened, adapted or legitimised by circulating between actors of the extreme right and the conventional right, we show How Digital Political Communication Contributes to the Normalisation of Exclusionary ideologies in democratic debate.
Finally, this study places forensic linguistics in the framework of more important questions. on legal categorisation and freedom of expression, highlighting how linguistic evidence can help identify the thresholds at which narrative persuasion becomes harmful in the online public sphere.