This document discusses research on emergent leadership in online communities. It presents early findings that nominated online leaders tend to have central, core positions in the community network and use positive, concise language in their many posts, more so than other members. The research aims to understand the structural and linguistic characteristics that distinguish leaders from other community members using computational analysis of communication data from three online forums. Future work is needed to further develop theories of emergent leadership and analyze language features of leadership in more depth.