Exploring Plurilingualism in Fan Fiction : ELF Users as Creative Writers [1 ed.] 9781443896085, 9781443898683

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Exploring Plurilingualism in Fan Fiction

Exploring Plurilingualism in Fan Fiction: ELF Users as Creative Writers By

Valeria Franceschi

Exploring Plurilingualism in Fan Fiction: ELF Users as Creative Writers By Valeria Franceschi This book first published 2017 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2017 by Valeria Franceschi All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-9868-6 ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-9868-3

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Charts and Tables ............................................................................ ix Acknowledgements .................................................................................... xi Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Chapter One ................................................................................................. 9 Participatory Culture: Fans and Their Practices 1.1 Special Audiences ............................................................................ 9 1.2 Fans and Fandom: Definitions ....................................................... 12 1.2.1 Fans as active agents ............................................................. 13 1.2.2 Fan productivity .................................................................... 15 1.3 The Communitarian Value of Fandom .......................................... 16 1.3.1 Shifting to virtual communities ............................................. 19 1.4 Social Practices .............................................................................. 22 1.4.1 Offline and face-to-face activities ......................................... 22 1.4.2 The internet era...................................................................... 23 1.5 Creative Practices........................................................................... 27 1.5.1 Fan art.................................................................................... 30 1.5.2 Written practices ................................................................... 32 1.6 Fan Fiction ..................................................................................... 32 1.7 Intertextuality in Fan Practices ...................................................... 33 1.8 Fandom and the Classroom ............................................................ 35 1.9 From Fandom to English ............................................................... 38 Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 41 English as a Lingua Franca, Fandom, and Communities 2.1 The Role of English in Fandom ..................................................... 41 2.2 English as a Global Language and Lingua Franca ......................... 44 2.2.1 Problematisation of the native speaker model ....................... 45 2.2.2 Deviations, innovations and strategies: function over form .. 48 2.2.3 Cooperation ........................................................................... 51 2.2.4 Plurilingual repertoires and code-switching .......................... 55 2.3 (Written) ELF and CMC ................................................................ 57 2.4 Language Choice Online................................................................ 60

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Table of Contents

2.4.1 Translocality and globalisation.............................................. 61 2.5 Fragmented Realities ..................................................................... 62 2.5.1 ELF and postmodernism ....................................................... 62 2.5.2 Online fandom and postmodernism....................................... 67 2.5.3 Fandom and CMC in postmodernism: spatiality and identity 68 2.6 Fandom and ELF: Postmodern Communities ................................ 72 Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 79 Corpus Selection and Method of Analysis 3.1 Introduction to Fan Fiction ............................................................ 79 3.1.1 Genres and types ................................................................... 80 3.1.2 Publication and archives ........................................................ 82 3.1.3 Projection of the self and resistance ...................................... 83 3.2 Preliminary Criteria for the Selection of the Corpus...................... 85 3.2.1 Selection of data source: FanFiction.net................................ 86 3.2.2 Narrowing the scope: manga and anime................................ 88 3.2.3 Finding suitable stories: ELF writers self-evaluating their competence in English.............................................................. 91 3.3 Fans Come First: Some Ethical Issues of Online Research ........... 93 3.3.1 The researcher as an insider .................................................. 96 3.4 The Corpus ..................................................................................... 98 3.5 The Writers .................................................................................. 100 3.6 From the Bilingual Paradigm to Code-switching in the Global Era ................................................................................................ 102 3.7 Code-switching and ELF ............................................................. 106 3.8 Code-switching and the Globalised Internet ................................ 110 3.9 Tying it all Up: Code-switching in ELF Online........................... 112 3.10 Code-switching, Polylingual Languaging, and Heteroglossia ... 114 Chapter Four ............................................................................................ 119 Writers and Readers: Plurilingual Identities in the Paratext 4.1 Translocality and the Paratext ...................................................... 119 4.2 Writing for Local and Global Audiences ..................................... 120 4.3 Reader Reviews: Feedback, Support and Constructive Criticism ...... 123 4.3.1 Peer evaluation of non-native writers .................................. 124 4.3.2 Plurilingualism in Reviews ................................................. 129 4.4 ELF Users as Successful Fan Fiction Writers .............................. 132 4.5 Writer-reader Dialogue ................................................................ 134 4.6 Metalinguistic Awareness, Translation, and Flagging ................. 136 4.6.1 Metalinguistic awareness .................................................... 137 4.6.2 Flagging of code-switching ................................................. 139 4.6.3 Translation........................................................................... 141

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Chapter Five ............................................................................................ 149 Code-switching and Fan Fiction 5.1 Corpus Analysis: Categories and Frequencies ............................. 149 5.2 Codification in Dictionaries ......................................................... 153 5.3 Linguistic Hybridity ..................................................................... 156 5.3.1 English-only creativity ........................................................ 158 5.4 Insertional Code-switching .......................................................... 160 5.4.1. Morphological integration .................................................. 168 5.5 Longer Strings and Lyrics ............................................................ 172 5.6. Interjections and Formulaic Language ........................................ 175 5.7 Honorifics .................................................................................... 182 5.7.1 Titles and Terms of Address ............................................... 186 5.8 Fictional Language Drawn from Source Texts ............................ 189 5.9 Discussion of Findings ................................................................. 193 5.9.1 Social functions ................................................................... 197 5.9.2 Pragmatic functions ............................................................. 199 5.9.3 Narrative functions .............................................................. 200 5.9.4 Heteroglossia and intelligibility .......................................... 201 5.9.5 Code-switching and construction of identity as ELF Writers .................................................................................... 202 5.9.6 Suggestions for further research .......................................... 203 Conclusion ............................................................................................... 205 Bibliography ............................................................................................ 211 Websites .................................................................................................. 237 Index ........................................................................................................ 239

LIST OF CHARTS AND TABLES

Figures 3.1.

Word Count per Language

3.2

Writers’ Native Language

Tables 4.1

Metalinguistic comments and switches in reader reviews

5.1

Data frequencies broken down by category

5.2

Data frequencies and percentages broken down by language

5.3

R1 collocates for frequent first names in the corpus

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

First and foremost, I would like to deeply thank my advisor Dr. Paola Vettorel at the University of Verona for her valuable guidance and support throughout my doctoral studies. This book would not have been possible without her help, assistance, and counsel. My heartfelt thanks go to my dissertation co-advisor Professor Anna Mauranen at the University of Helsinki for her precious insights and comments, which have improved my work greatly, and for hosting me at the University of Helsinki for the spring semester 2012. In addition, I would like to express my appreciation to the Head of the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures of the University of Verona, Professor Roberta Facchinetti, for her solid presence and always helpful advice. I would also like to thank Dr. Serena dal Maso for her precious suggestions on the linguistic analysis of my data and for introducing me to Takayo Miura, whom along with Tecla Mammoli I thank for their assistance as experts in the Japanese language. Finally, I thank the fan fiction writers at Fanfiction.net who allowed me to collect their stories for my corpus, without which this work would have never been possible.

INTRODUCTION

The pervasive role of English as a global language and as a shared language of communication has attracted academic interest that has developed into a prolific field of research, spanning multiple domains and areas of language use. Tourism, academia, diplomacy, business, and the media are only a few among the areas that have, officially or unofficially, adopted English as the working language for international, cross-cultural interactions (e.g. Crystal 2003, 2008). English use in these contexts is associated with a progressive reduction of traditional spatial boundaries, represented by increased mobility and migration fluxes, and the annihilation of the spatial dimension in digital environments (Chouliaraki and Fairclough 1999; Pennycook 2012; Cogo 2012b; Blommaert and Backus 2013), thus creating communicative settings where identity and meaning are often constructed and mutually negotiated in a lingua franca. These types of contexts show a flexible and fluid usage of the language, which can no longer be conceived as a monolithic, self-contained entity but is adopted and adapted by its users— often in conjunction with other languages—in order to achieve specific pragmatic and social goals in contingent communicative events. Research in phonology, lexicogrammar, pragmatics, idiomaticity, and plurilingual practices has shed light on how speakers of English as a lingua franca (ELF) manage cross-cultural interactions and maintain intelligibility as they negotiate the interaction on their own terms, employing marked linguistic forms and communicative strategies that do not necessarily conform to native speaker language use. ELF studies have attempted to dismantle the long-standing native speaker/non-native speaker dichotomy, showing that native-like competence is not paramount to effective communication in the international context. The erosion of the myth of the native speaker as the ultimate authority on English use (e.g. Kalocsai 2009) goes hand in hand with a shift in the conception of the ELF user, who is seen as a fully-fledged user of English rather than a perpetual learner always falling short of an impossible target. Deviations from native forms and norms are not seen as errors or symptoms of a lack of communicative competence (Widdowson 2012, 8). Non-conformity to native norms takes a backseat in ELF discourse, as the functional motivation underlying the use of marked forms is at the core of many ELF

2

Introduction

studies. ELF users appear to be listener-oriented, engaging in cooperative linguistic behaviour, adapting the language to the perceived needs to the contingency of each communicative event (Seidlhofer 2011, 50). ELF speakers have been shown to exploit all the skills and resources at their disposal in order to achieve their communicative goals, ensuring conversational fluency and preventing communication breakdowns. These strategies involve the exploitation of the speaker’s plurilingual repertoire; that is, the L1(s) and LN(s) the speaker is familiar with but not necessarily fluent in. Indeed, cross-linguistic influence and plurilingual phenomena are not uncommon and may play a significant role in ELF conversation (Seidlhofer 2011, 104; Cogo 2012a, 103) as other languages are used deliberately by ELF speakers for communicative and social purposes. The global status of English and the changes that this status has brought to the way the language is used in multilingual environments has inevitable implications for English Language Teaching, too. Since the early days of ELF research, the pedagogical repercussions of ELF studies have been a matter of interest; however, studies on this aspect of ELF have surged in more recent years (Bayyurt and Ackan 2015; Vettorel 2015; Kohn 2014), including empirical research in the classroom as well as teacher education in order to foster ELF awareness in pre-service and inservice teachers. The adaptability, fragmentation, hybridity, and contingency of ELF in cross-cultural contexts define such language use as a postmodern phenomenon (Seidlhofer 2011), irreducible to the status of a self-contained, codified variety of English inscribable within a traditional ELT framework. Research has so far been focused on spoken ELF, with the main corpora, VOICE1 (The Vienna-Oxford International Corpus of English), ELFA2 (English as a Lingua Franca in Academic Settings), and the more recent ACE3 (The Asian Corpus of English) including data from spoken interactions; however, more recently the scope of ELF research has widened to encompass written texts, too. Specifically, interest has emerged in the use of ELF in digital environments, as testified by Poppi’s (2012) and Vettorel’s (2014) studies, focusing on e-mail interactions and corporate websites and blogging practices, respectively. The corpus of written

1

www.univie.ac.at/voice. Accessed July 20, 2016. www.helsinki.fi/elfa/elfacorpus. Accessed July 20, 2016. 3 ACE. The Asian Corpus of English. Director: Andy Kirkpatrick; Researchers: Wang Lixun, John Patkin, Sophiann Subhan, 2014. http://corpus.ied.edu.hk/ace. Accessed July 20, 2016. 2

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academic ELF (WrELFA4) recently compiled at the University of Helsinki includes both traditional written texts and online data drawn from scientific research blogs. This interest mirrors the prominent role that English plays in digital environments, allowing information flows and international communication to occur on the increasingly multilingual Internet. As shown by Vettorel’s study on personal blogging in ELF and a number of studies focused primarily on aspects related to L2 acquisition in digital environments (Lam 2000, 2004 2006; Duff 2002; Black 2005a, 2008, 2009b; Dongping, Newgarden, and Young 2012; Peterson 2012), the use of English in online environments is not limited to specific functional purposes related to a speaker’s job or education, since nonnative speakers of English employ the language for leisure and social purposes. Indeed, globalisation processes occurring in modern society have not bypassed some of the more mundane aspects of human life, such as entertainment. Music, movies, literature, and comics have crossed the geographical boundaries of their countries of origin to be increasingly distributed across the world. At the same time, fascination with pop culture and its products has spurred the emergence of sections of audiences developing a deeper emotional attachment and investment in the consumed texts. Taking their appreciation for pop culture to a deeper level, they engage with the texts in an active way, challenging and renegotiating canonical readings and expanding their experience through the creation of alternative texts stemming from the original material. They are “the most visible and identifiable of audiences” (Lewis 1992, 1); that is, fans. Fans engage in a multitude of social and creative practices whereby the act of media consumption results in the production of new texts (Jenkins 1992a). The practice of reworking existing material is known as remixing (Knobel and Lankshear 2008), and in fandom it exists in a variety of forms—graphic, audiovisual, and written—with plenty of room for multimodal productions. Recent studies suggest that fan fiction writing— that is, the writing of fiction inspired by existing pop culture texts—is a very popular practice among fans, with an estimated 60% claiming to have written at least one piece (Meggers 2012, 25). In the early days, fan fiction and art were collected into amateur magazines called fanzines, which were mailed to subscribers and sold at conventions. However, fandom itself has become globalised over time as, from the 1990s onwards, local fan clubs and conventions developed into a mass phenomenon of worldwide 4

http://www.helsinki.fi/englanti/elfa/wrelfa.html. Accessed July 20, 2016; see also Carey (2013a, 2013c, 2013d).

4

Introduction

proportions, with fans travelling across continents to attend comic and media conventions. Furthermore, thanks to the spread of internet access, fans can interact daily in digital environments, giving life to vast online networks. Often, fans from all over the world gather together in digital environments to form international social groups where discussion of the original texts and the sharing of fan-made creative products takes place. Most of these international groups employ English as a shared language of communication, even when the original texts do not stem from Englishspeaking culture; this is the case, for example, of Japanese comics and animation. The fragmented, hybrid, and contingent nature of ELF mirrors the characteristics of online fandom, which may be defined as a network of interconnected, non-geographically bound groupings of people. Both notions challenge traditional definitions of community as constrained by spatial and linguistic boundaries. A postmodern perspective may therefore be adopted in discussing ELF and fandom as two products of globalisation processes in order to hypothesise a model that can account for the complex structure as well as the contingency and diversity of ELF communicative events and fan groups online. As will be seen, both fandom and ELF are not exempt from the tension between the global and the local, which are in constant interplay with each other (Chouliaraki and Fairclough 1999; Giddens 1991). Indeed, the local still surfaces in ELF cross-cultural interaction, as the users’ linguacultural background may be conveyed explicitly in ELF talk through direct use of other languages or metalinguistic discussion (Pölzl 2003; Cogo 2009, 2012a; Klimpfinger 2007, 2009). The linguacultural diversity of participants in ELF interactions—both online and offline—entails that every participant in a given ELF interaction is at least bilingual, speaking one or more L1 in addition to English, and potentially other LNs as well. As a result, these languages may occur in ELF communicative contexts—as they are part of the users’ linguistic repertoires—as an additional resource to negotiate meaning and achieve social and pragmatic purposes. Indeed, the exploitation of plurilingual resources in ELF should not be dismissed as a way to merely fill a lexical gap in the user’s knowledge of English vocabulary, even though such uses may occur, although they may be conceived as strategies that contribute to the negotiation of meaning and social rapport. The notion of ELF speakers’ multilingualism is inextricable from ELF itself, to the point that a re-theorisation of ELF has been recently suggested by Jenkins in order to foreground its multilingual nature (J. Jenkins 2015, 61).

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The proposed notion of English as a Multilingua Franca shifts the focus away from English, which remains “available as a contact language of choice, but not always chosen” (ibid., 73). The use and purpose of plurilingual processes in ELF contexts are the object of this research; specifically, the analysis will focus on the phenomena of multiple language use occurring in fan fiction written by ELF users. In this study, I will attempt to describe how and for which purposes non-native speakers of English participating in popular international fandom practices, specifically fan fiction, employ their plurilingual resources in their stories. The first chapter introduces the concepts of fan and fandom from an academic perspective. A definition of fan and fandom is provided, as well as an overview of the social and creative practices that pop culture fans engage in. Special attention is paid to the social aspect of fandom, which is at the root of the phenomenon. The notions of “virtual community” and “sense of community” are employed to illustrate the characteristics of an international interest-based group that falls outside the traditional definition of community as a geographically-bound entity. The productive aspect of fandom is analysed and fans are described as active agents, engaging in a number of creative and social practices. The second chapter opens with a remark on the globalised nature of fandom and the widespread use of English as a language of communication among fans. The notion of ELF is then applied to computer-mediated communication and fandom, and points of convergence are found between these elements as they can be partly seen as the result of globalisation processes that have broken traditional spatial boundaries and traditional modernist paradigms. Drawing from the rhizome model introduced by Deleuze and Guattari (1987) and the notions of translocality (Hepp 2009; Leppनnen et al. 2009) and super-diversity (Vertovec 2007; Cogo 2012b), it was possible to describe ELF and fandom as postmodern phenomena taking place outside traditional social and geographical spaces. Chapter three presents the fan fiction corpus on which this research is based. The criteria for the selection of non-native writers and stories are listed and discussed. In particular, the choice of manga-inspired fan fiction highlights the international character of fandom, as native and non-native speakers of English alike employ the language to write about a culture that is extraneous to all of them, as none of the participants have a primarily Japanese linguacultural background. As a result, native speakers of English “lose” their advantage of having English as their L1 since attention has shifted to a different, non-English-speaking culture and its traditions. It is also illustrated how due attention was paid to ethical issues

6

Introduction

related to working with internet material during the selection of data for the corpus. A description of the corpus is followed by an account of the method of analysis: due to the peculiar nature of the data, necessitating a mixed approach, the reader is guided through the process of adopting an appropriate method of analysis, starting from the traditional code-switching theory (Gumperz 1982; Myers-Scotton 1997; Appel and Muysken 1995; Auer 1999) before moving to the newer frameworks of polylingual languaging (Jørgensen 2008) and linguistic heteroglossia (Leppänen 2012). Chapter four delves into the empirical analysis of what is defined as the paratext of the fan fiction, that is Author’s Notes and summaries as well as reader reviews. This investigation is meant to clarify the immediate context in which the stories constituting the corpus are situated and explore the writers’ construction of their own identities as authors and fans as well as the establishment of a communication channel between writers and readers. These aspects are explored from an ELF perspective in relation to the use, on both the writers’ and the readers’ part, of linguistic elements drawn from their plurilingual repertoires. Data output appears to highlight the collaborative and supportive quality of fandom and its social nature even in practices that are not highly, or always, interactional. These characteristics are also applicable to ELF communication, where mutual support is paramount if intelligibility is to be reached and/or maintained, and the last part of the chapter is dedicated to metalinguistic awareness and the practice of flagging multilingual elements. This will show how writers engage with the linguacultural diversity of both fandom participants and the characters in their stories, and the strategies they employ to ensure that switches into other languages are accessible to their readers. Chapter five shifts the focus to the exploitation of plurilingual resources in the stories themselves, where these resources fulfil a number of social, pragmatic, and narrative functions. Occurrences of elements of other languages are categorised according to language, type, and function in the stories. Special attention is paid to the language of the switch in relation to the linguacultural setting of the story, which highlights the complexity of such practices in the universe of fandom where they are influenced by the contingency of narrative contexts. Analysis is followed by a discussion of the results inferred from the analysis, which links the data output back to the rhizomatic model introduced in chapter two. The importance of the social element for fans and writers, who use their plurilingual competence to construct their identities as successful members of the writing community and fandom, is reiterated. Data output suggests

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that plurilingual practices in written ELF are in line with results from earlier studies on spoken ELF (Klimpfinger 2007, 2009; Cogo 2009). The peculiar characteristics of the fan fiction context also entail that the functions identified in the data overlap only partly with those relating to spoken language; however, the tendency to use single-word elements or conversational routines may be related to the necessity to maintain the text as accessible to readers who may not be familiar with the languages employed in the stories. The chapter closes with suggestions for further research on fan fiction and ELF. This study attempts to position itself within the emerging interest for written ELF as mentioned above and for the study of plurilingual practices as integrating characteristics of digital contexts generally, and of ELF communication specifically. Multilingualism online not only perceives the internet as an environment where multiple languages coexist and are used at the same time (Danet and Herring 2007), but also includes contexts where multiple languages—and varieties—appear in the same space (Leppänen 2012; Leppänen and Peuronen 2012; Lee and Barton 2012; Barton and Lee 2013) and come to fulfil different functions in the discourse. As English has become the globalised language of communication and is to this day the most likely language to be used in international groups (Crystal 2001; Danet and Herring 2007; Vettorel 2014), interest for linguistic practices online is growing in the ELF research community. Especially where ELF is concerned, this study is meant to investigate the use of the participants’ plurilingual resources in an ELF-related online context, as the manifestation of plurilingual competence in terms of switches into other languages has so far focused mostly on spoken contexts (Pölzl 2003; Klimpfinger 2007, 2009; Cogo 2009). This research tries to expand on research on online language uses in a translocal context that does not involve physical mobility, but exists within geographicallyunbound digital environments. Here, groups of like-minded individuals come together, creating and maintaining social relations with other members of their communities, producing shared content via ELF communication: its use in leisure contexts exists alongside ELF as the working language in professional and educational environments, and can constitute a vast and fertile ground for research in ELF communication and related aspects.

CHAPTER ONE PARTICIPATORY CULTURE: FANS AND THEIR PRACTICES

1.1 Special Audiences Becoming passionate about something has happened to everyone at one or another stage in life: a sports team, a music genre, a singer or a band, or again a book, comic, TV show, or movie. This appreciation might be expressed in a number of ways and with varying degrees of intensity: it is one thing to own and love all the Harry Potter books and quite another to spend hours queuing outside a bookshop in a Hogwarts costume to buy a copy of the last book of the series on the day of its release.1 There is a similar difference in enjoying Elvis Presley’s music and making a yearly pilgrimage to his mansion-turned-museum Graceland. The second type of audience just described has a much deeper, emotional investment in the object of their interest, and has become known as a separate group from what is commonly referred to as an audience: they are fans. This is a very recognisable and familiar term, but at the same time it is hard to pinpoint what a fan is. Henry Jenkins, who focused his academic study on media fans,2 wrote in the introduction to his seminal book Textual Poachers that his “most difficult claim [would] be that such a widespread and diverse group may still constitute a recognizable subculture” (H. Jenkins 1992a, 1). There is indeed such a wide variety of fan types, engaging in a number of social and creative activities, both faceto-face and in virtual environments, that it is extremely difficult to circumscribe and define a specific group of fans and associate them with activities that are distinctive of that group. The overview of the practices presented here will attempt to give at least an idea of the complexity and heterogeneity of the universe of fans 1

“Harry Potter Mania Peaks as Hundreds Queue,” The Telegraph, July 20, 2007. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1557992/Harry-Potter-mania-peaks-ashundreds-queue.html. 2 “[E]nthusiasts of film and television” (H. Jenkins 1992a: 1).

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Chapter One

and how their interests and activities overlap and knit together to create a complex network. However, due to the vastness of the topic and the issues associated with it, only the category of media fans will be taken into consideration. According to H. Jenkins: “this group embraces not a single text or even a single genre but many texts—American and British dramatic series, Hollywood genre films, comic books, Japanese animation, popular fiction (particularly science fiction, fantasy, and mystery)” (ibid.). In other words, these fans engage in social and productive practices inspired by one or more source texts, either printed or audiovisual, involving fictional narratives. Indeed, for our purposes we might adopt the definition of fandom put forward by Sandvoss “as the regular, emotionally involved consumption of a given popular narrative or text” (2005, 8). Fandom, a derivational term formed by adding the suffix –dom to the word “fan,” is also the term by which the ensemble of individuals engaging in fan practices is designated. As Coppa (2006, 42) points out, fandom originally referred to sports and theatre, and it was later taken on by science fiction aficionados, who “developed much of the fannish infrastructure, jargon, and language still in use today.” In contemporary use, the term is its own hyperonym and hyponym at the same time: it has a more generalised meaning by which it functions as an umbrella term to encompass all fans which exists alongside a narrower connotation. The word is indeed used to define a group of enthusiasts “for some amusement or some artist,”3 describing both the type of entertainment or the specific object of the fan’s attention. To make a clarifying example, we may speak of science fiction fandom and of fantasy fandom, which include all the fans of the respective genres; in turn, the fantasy fandom incorporates Lord of the Rings fandom, Harry Potter fandom, and Merlin fandom, which refer to different media (literature and cinema for the first two and television for the latter). The difference between fans and a regular audience is not only defined by the intensity of the fans’ appreciation for their text(s) of choice but also by the collective character of fandom, whereby the enjoyment of the source text is enhanced and expanded beyond the text proper by engaging in a number of related social and creative activities with other likeminded individuals. Indeed, the phenomenon is also referred to as participatory culture, “which transforms the experience of media consumption into the production of new texts” (H. Jenkins 1992a, 46), as will be seen throughout this chapter. Since the very beginning of fandom as it is conceived nowadays, one of the crucial elements was contact among fans. 3

“‫ޖ‬fandom, n.” OED Online. September 2013. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/68041?redirectedFrom=fandom. Accessed July 20, 2016.

Participatory Culture: Fans and Their Practices

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The communitarian element of fandom is at the very core of fan life, as the fans’ individual experience as audience is shared and reworked through interaction with other fans, which leads to the creation of new and multiple layers of interpretation of the original texts, and, as a consequence, prolonged enjoyment of both the original text and the social element itself. Participating in fandom entails “automatically more than the mere act of being a fan of something: it [is] a collective strategy, a communal effort to form interpretive communities that in their subcultural cohesion evaded the preferred and intended meanings … represented by popular media” (Gray, Sandvoss and Harrington 2007, 2). Likeminded individuals come together in face-to-face direct interaction as well as in mediated communication, from letters and fan magazines to the online modes that constitute the main media that fans use nowadays to discuss source texts and engage in creative multimodal reworkings of the original texts (Andrejevic 2008). While the term “community” is often used in relation to fandom as a whole, it is hard to circumscribe the heterogeneity of the media fan population within an encompassing definition of community: they are “an amorphous, but still identifiable grouping of enthusiasts” (H. Jenkins 1992a, 1). Jenkins’ words are suitable for illustrating the notion of fandom in its broader sense: its inability to fit within a traditional notion of community while at the same time being recognisable as a group of individuals sharing a passion for one or more media texts and engaging in social and productive activities. It is a complex and multilayered universe that is often challenging to understand for “mundanes” (H. Jenkins 2006) and sometimes even for fans themselves, as the countless subsets and facets of fandom make it tricky to propose generalised assumptions that might be valid for fandom in its entirety. Indeed, “that collective, what we might call fandom, is itself not cohesive” (Busse and Hellekson 2006, 6, emphasis in original). The fan population as a whole is divided into individual, distinctive fandoms, which still fall under the same broad category but work according to their own norms and rules, developed over time and learned by fans as they participate in their activities and practices. Self-identification as a fan and feelings of membership, as will be seen, are two of the most important elements in defining the notion of fandom as showing elements retraceable to the notion of community. In turn, fans associate in a variety of smaller groups, revolving around specific texts or specific media of communication—a discussion forum, a website—that might be identified as self-regulating communities functioning within the wider fandom network. These communities are becoming increasingly international. The structure, scope, and diffusion of fandom have changed over time due to

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Chapter One

processes of globalisation and digitalisation which have significantly internationalised the phenomenon. Growing numbers of people distributed across continents are nowadays participating in online fan activities based on media texts, meeting online to discuss their favourite TV show, comic, or movie, sharing thoughts and interpretations as well as alternative narratives produced through multiple modalities: visual, audiovisual, and textual, all the while engaging in social interaction within a global environment. Due to the heterogeneous, multi-faceted quality of contemporary online fandom, this chapter does not have the ambition of giving a complete taxonomy of its workings and structure; its purpose is to provide a framework for the sociolinguistic context from which the data for this study is drawn, as well as familiarise the reader with the jargon and language underlying the practice under examination.

1.2 Fans and Fandom: Definitions Fans are “the most visible and identifiable of audiences” (Lewis 1992, 1). In every audience consuming mass commercial entertainment today, a group can usually be identified that stands out because of the active and interactive engagement of its members with the consumed text; in Lewis’ words: they’re the ones who wear the colors of their favorite team, the ones who record their soap operas on VCRs to watch after the work day is over, the ones who tell you every detail about a movie’s star life and work, the ones who sit in line for hours for front row ticket to rock concerts. (ibid.)

Fans do not content themselves with passive enjoyment of their favourite text but develop an affective attachment to them, enhancing the pleasure derived from consumption by engaging actively with them. They turn “personal reaction into social interaction” (H. Jenkins 2006, 41), sharing thoughts and opinions with other likeminded people and transforming passive reception into active production. There are many types of fans who associate into groups devoted to more specific interests and topics. These communities share a set of practices and related jargon that are often not intelligible to outsiders (Harris 1998, 8); such jargon in turn branches out into terminology and linguistic features distinctive of each individual group of fans, distinguishing them from others. As will be seen, the communitarian experience is fundamental for the fan, who could not be called such without a network of other fans supporting and sharing their attachment for a given text (McQuail 1997, 121). Membership of fandom

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can be described in terms of the degree of attachment to a given text on the part of a group that stands out in contrast with passive audiences (McQuail 1997; Hills 2000). Indeed, affiliation with fandom cannot be defined with sharp boundaries; on the contrary, the concept of fandom should be understood as a continuum where each single member is placed according to their involvement with the practices associated with the group of fans they belong to. However, certain attitudes and behaviours can be perceived as too excessive even within a given fan community; in Brooker’s view, fandom is characterised by: an immersion in the detail of the text and often its surrounding intertexts; a sense of monkish study leading to effortless familiarity that tends to inspire contempt or ridicule in those outside the culture or even sometimes from those inside it who regard this kind of obsession as a step too far. (2005, 866)

The engagement with fandom can indeed be marginal in terms of fan experience, or more absorbing, with active participation in creative transformative practices inspired by the source text or fan gatherings and meetings, known as conventions: “individual acts of media choice, attention, and response can be more or less active, in terms of degree of motivation, involvement, pleasure, critical or creative response, connection with the rest of life, and so forth” (McQuail 1997, 22). Fandom implies a productive element, which constitutes its main essential characteristic: as was said, fan activities go beyond mere reception of an event or text.

1.2.1 Fans as active agents Fiske (1992, 46) defines fandom as a “heightened form of popular culture,” which “echoes many of the institutions of official culture” (ibid., 33). Fandom is indeed primarily associated with mass cultural forms that are considered lowbrow and thought to appeal to those segments of society that, because of discriminating factors of race, gender, age, and class, have no or limited access to what is seen as “high” culture (ibid., 30). The fan is seen as an inadequate individual, unable to function normally in society, with “fragile self-esteem, weak or nonexistent social alliances” (Jensen 1992, 18); mass-media products, on the other hand, provide a space that falls outside society and traditional cultural hierarchies so that fans may “bolster, organize and enliven their unsatisfying lives” (ibid.). However, fans show the ability to exploit mass-industrial products to their own ends as a sign of rebellion against mainstream society; to discuss and elaborate on socially and politically controversial topics relatable to

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the fans’ real life and contingent historical and political situation, such as women and minority rights, homophobia, and discrimination (Fiske 1992; H. Jenkins 1992a; Becque 2012; Coker 2012). They are not the “cultural dopes” (Grossberg 1992, 53, see also Black 2008, xiii) often depicted by public opinion—mindless consumers ready to squander their money on concert and convention tickets, CDs, DVDs, comics, and the plethora of gadget merchandise that can be associated with media and sports fandom. According to Grossberg, fans are aware of being pawns within a commercial and economic structure of “power and domination” and that they risk being manipulated by the messages conveyed through such cultural forms (1992, 53). Jenkins similarly points out that fans’ critical abilities are not overshadowed by blind appreciation of the original text; on the contrary, a “sense of proximity and possession coexists quite comfortably with a sense of ironic distance” (H. Jenkins 1992a, 65). However, it is by means of this very awareness that most fans are able to partake in popular culture according to their own conditions; not as passive audiences being bombarded by content with underlying economic and political interests, but by turning consumption into production and transforming the source text into something new. Fandom indeed implies a productive element which constitutes its main essential characteristic: fan activities go beyond the mere reception of an event or text. One of the main reasons fans find so much pleasure in repeated readings of the original texts lies in “what the reader brings to the text, not what she finds there” (ibid., 74). They are not manipulated by their chosen texts—on the contrary, it is they who manipulate the texts which constitute “raw materials for their own cultural productions and the basis for their social interactions” (ibid., 23–4). The vision hereby presented has shifted over time, thanks also to the role the early scholar-fans played in drawing a picture of fandom that illustrated the complexity of the social and productive practices involved (Busse and Hellekson 2012). Understanding of fandom and acceptance of its practices as part of a normal manner of engaging with media texts is now more widespread; acknowledgement and acceptance of fandom has seeped into the mainstream audience as well as the original media source, as demonstrated by the references to fandom, and specifically fan fiction, that have started to appear on popular TV shows (ibid., 50). This type of “meta-commentary” is made a “part of the show itself” (Coker 2012, 94), suggesting at least a partial bridging of the gap between the mainstream audience and the aficionados. As Gray, Sandvoss and Harrington (2007, 5) similarly point out, in terms of fan perceptions from outsiders, “none of the high-profile fan cultures in recent years—from X-Philes via Eminem fans to Sex in [sic] the City

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enthusiasts—had to endure the derogative treatment of Star Trek fans.” Being a fan has lost part of its negative connotation over time; fandom is now perceived as an existing aspect of popular-culture consumption, with fans being marketed to as consumers of media-related merchandise and memorabilia (ibid., 5), reinforcing the notion of a reduced distance between fans and audience, as well as text producers and fans.

1.2.2 Fan productivity Fandom constitutes a medium of construction and of expression of one’s identity as well as a fertile environment for social contact. Identity construction through fandom is one of the three types of productivity identified by Fiske (1992) in relation to the fan experience, respectively labelled as semiotic, enunciative, and textual. Semiotic productivity is “essentially interior” (Fiske 1992, 37) and “consists of the making of meanings of social identity and of social experience from the semiotic resources of the cultural commodity” (ibid.). Semiotic productivity turns into enunciative productivity when the created meanings are publicly expressed and shared within the fan community. The most important semiotic vehicle of enunciation is verbal language, which translates into “fan talk” in fandom (ibid., 38). Discussion and elaboration of the contents and meanings of the chosen texts and their relation to the real lives of fans are one of the most frequent social practices fans engage and find pleasure in. Online discussion groups about television shows, for instance, have thrived since the very dawn of the internet age (Baym 1993; Wakefield 2001; Sturgis 2006; Rifà-Valls 2011). As Jenkins states, “such discussions expand the experience of the texts beyond its initial consumption” (H. Jenkins 1992a, 45); negotiation and the creation of meaning determine and shape the relationship fans have with the original text. However, verbal communication is not the only means of enunciation fans have at their disposal. Affiliation to one or more fandoms can be communicated visually through clothes, styling, and accessories. A band or team shirt, accessories, and assorted memorabilia can convey, within and outside a particular fan community, an individual’s tastes and potential adherence to the values and messages perpetrated by the subject of a fan’s admiration (ibid.). Clothing style not only fulfils the enunciative function theorised by Fiske but also operates as a beacon of recognition for other likeminded individuals in the real world. Indeed, despite what has often been said about fans, they are not always members of the deprived and unprivileged sections of society, trying to find through popular culture the kind of

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empowerment that is denied to them by the standing power structure of modern society. On the contrary, they are often highly educated individuals (H. Jenkins 1992a, 18) for whom enthusiasm for popular culture and knowledge and appreciation of highbrow culture go hand in hand. The first redeeming studies of fan culture came in the early 1990s from academics who were also fans themselves and who, for this reason, labelled themselves as Aca/Fen (more recently acafans and scholar-fans)— a blend of academic and fen, which was an alternative plural of fan used within fan communities at the time (H. Jenkins 2006, 4). As Jenkins himself wrote in the introduction to Textual Poachers (1992a, 5), “I have found approaching popular culture as a fan gives me new insights into the media by releasing me from the narrowly circumscribed categories and assumptions of academic criticism.” His ethnographic studies of media fan culture concentrate on fans’ transformative practices, which correspond to the third type of productivity theorised by Fiske; namely, textual productivity. Where media fandom is concerned, textual productivity consists mostly of the creation of new texts inspired by the originals, which are then circulated among fans. Fan productivity is the reason why fan culture is also known as participatory culture. These activities range across many genres—textual, audiovisual, graphic—and have become much more widely distributed and visible since the diffusion of the internet gave fans access to an extensive space to host their products freely. As a result, these materials are now accessible to fans internationally, which was rare before the 1990s, when the distribution of fan-produced material was narrow and limited to a small number of aficionados.

1.3 The Communitarian Value of Fandom The idea of community is an essential tenet of fandom, and not least one of the main factors distinguishing fans from other types of audiences: “fan reception cannot and does not exist in isolation but is always shaped through input from other fans” (H. Jenkins 1992b, 210). The fan experience has no reason to exist outside a social dimension: it necessitates a communitarian space where semiotic and textual input can be shared and negotiated with others. Fandom can be defined as an interpretive community (ibid.), because interpretation and negotiation of the meanings of the original texts, or of new ones introduced by others, are continuously ongoing: “fan interpretations need to be understood in institutional rather than personal

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terms” (ibid.). In social events, such as fan club meetings and conventions, and textual spaces such as zines (Perkins n.d.), printed or online newsletters, message boards, and chats, the original texts are analysed and reinterpreted, traditional readings—the canon4—are challenged, and new interpretations are put forward and shared with other members of the community for evaluation and feedback. Fan interpretations are in turn debated and disputed by other fans, or well received as acceptable alternative readings. Fan communities foster the discussion of topics and issues that relate to the fans’ real-life experiences as well as the contingent historical-political context; indeed, fan talk “sparks conversations soon drifting far away from the primary text that had initially drawn them together” (H. Jenkins 1992a, 81). These types of social interaction suggest that fan communities are ascribable to the category of communities of interest, that is, groups that are “concerned with the quality and character of human relations without reference to location” (Obst, Zinkiewicz, and Smith 2002a, 88). The other main definition of community, on the other hand, entails a geographic element and, as a result, “a sense of belonging to a particular area” (ibid.). While the earlier concept of community highlighted the territorial element, the fragmentation of modern society has shifted the fulcrum of communities to shared interests and goals—either professional or personal—around which these social groups develop. It is hard to give a complete definition of community due to the number of facets and elements that combine in the structuring and maintenance of a given community, and it is just as difficult to determine the essential elements which give a specific group the status of community. There was initially a certain reluctance to forgo the geographical or location element as essential in communities, and it was argued that groups without roots in a physical environment, such as online groups, should not be considered communities. At best, they may be defined as “pseudo-communities” (Jones 1998, 13), as the lack of face-to-face interaction is considered a hindrance to the successful development of the strong social ties that are usually associated with communities. Fan communities exist in both physical and virtual environments, with online communication increasing exponentially and giving life to fandom as a mass phenomenon. Social practices and association with communities occur in real life trough fan club gatherings, conventions, and participation in events such as matches and concerts. In the digital world they occur by 4

“[T]he events presented in the media source that provide the universe, setting, and characters” (Busse and Hellekson 2006: 9).

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means of one of the many social platforms and networks that allow group interaction online. Obst, Zinkiewicz, and Smith (2002a; 2002b) have carried out research on the notion of community applied to science fiction fandom, which constitutes a very large and active segment of fandom. As a result, the reasoning at the base of their research can easily be applied to other fan communities sharing the same social and participatory practices of science fiction fandom: as the authors point out, “this community is of particular interest, as it is a community with membership from all over the world, yet one that is clearly aware of its own identity and history” (Obst, Zinkiewicz, and Smith 2002a, 92). Indeed, even though it “operates on an international basis with fewer geographic connections than other relational communities” (ibid., 97), it fosters the formation and maintenance of strong social ties among members, who demonstrate high levels of what is known as the Psychological Sense of Community (PSOC). PSOC is defined as “a feeling that members have of belonging, a feeling that members matter to one another and to the group, and a shared faith that members’ needs will be met through their commitment to be together” (McMillan and Chavis 1986, 9, in Abfalter, Zaglia, and Mueller 2012, 400). It consists of four dimensions that interact dynamically with each other: membership, influence, integration and fulfilment of needs, and shared emotional connection. Membership includes the sense of belonging, personal investment, and emotional safety that are involved in being part of a community. Influence relates to a community’s cohesiveness and attractiveness, involving the community’s influence on its members and the members’ perception of control over the community. Integration and fulfilment of needs are based on the assumption that community cohesiveness is provided by “common needs, goals, beliefs, and values” (Obst and White 2004, 692); participation in a successful community and interaction with other members allow participants to fulfil a number of their perceived needs. A shared emotional connection refers to the social bonds formed between members of the community over time, and depends on “a shared community history, shared events, positive interaction, and identication with the community” (Abfalter, Zaglia, and Mueller 2012, 401). These four elements that make up PSOC are primarily measured according to different scales, among which one of the most established is the Sense of Community Index (SCI), which has been used in a variety of studies to determine PSOC levels in various types of communities, from geographical communities to communities of interests to virtual communities (for a list of references see Obst and White 2004, 693).

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1.3.1 Shifting to virtual communities With the exponential increase in digital communication emerge questions about the nature of virtual communities and whether PSOC may be an applicable concept for a type of group interaction that does not entail regular face-to-face communication over prolonged periods. As the majority of fandom activities these days occur online rather than in physical environments, the issues raised in relation to virtual communities can also be applied to fan communities. In the early days of online groups, it was debatable whether it was appropriate to even refer to such social settings as communities (e.g. Fernback and Thompson 1995). One of the first scholars to advocate virtual groups as communities was Rheingold (1993), who defines them as “social aggregations that emerge from the [internet] when enough people carry on those public discussions long enough, with sufficient human feeling, to form webs of personal relationships in cyberspace.” He adds that “people in virtual communities do just about everything people do in real life, but we leave our bodies behind” (ibid.), which suggests a theorisation of equality between online and offline social interaction. For many people, participation in virtual environments is a rich and meaningful social experience. Wellman and Gulia’s (1999) study similarly suggests that strong social bonds are possible in online groups, and that lack of face-to-face interaction does not necessarily impair the formation and successful maintenance of intimate friendships and relationships online over time. In other words, internet users build and maintain social ties that are no different in many aspects from those emerging in face-to-face interaction (Blanchard and Markus 2004). Cyberspace-based relationships entail frequent and voluntary interaction over prolonged periods, and strong ties may be developed among members as in offline contexts. Frequent and prolonged participation in group interactions by at least a number of core members is an essential requirement for a group to be identified as a community (Ridings and Gefen 2004). Korenman and Wyatt (1996) and Figallo (1998) both identify one major criterion according to which an online group may be referred to as a community, namely the members’ awareness of belonging to one (Blanchard and Markus 2004). A community can therefore be considered as such if it feels like one to its members. This brings us back to the concept of PSOC introduced earlier. Community psychologists have tried to apply and adapt the four elements of PSOC to virtual communities in order to optimise research on the subject: virtual communities share many fundamental aspects with location-based relational communities: “their members’ social interaction is directed to a well-understood focus, such as a common aim, shared

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identity, common belongings, or shared interests” (Abfalter, Zaglia, and Mueller 2012, 400). However, there are also substantial differences between the two which originate from the different environments and the medium of communication characterising the two types of community: “online communities overcome limitations such as synchronousness, physical proximity, or spatial cohesiveness needed for face-to-face interaction” as well as anonymity (ibid., 401; see also Forster 2004). Blanchard (2007, 2008) brought to the fore the need for a different scale to measure the Sense of Virtual Community (SOVC) that is more appropriate and adjusted to fit the peculiar characteristics of virtual communities than the SCI, which is used to measure PSOC in traditional face-to-face communities and which has also been applied to online groups. In order to do so, it is first necessary to pinpoint the constituting elements of SOVC: Koh and Kim (2003) and Tonteri et al. (2011), among others, analysed how the four dimensions of PSOC cross over to SOVC and where they need adjustments in definition and scope to be representative of virtual contexts. Tonteri et al. (2011) identified five dimensions of SOVC: membership, including a member’s “rights and obligations” (Tonteri et al. 2011, 2216); the feeling of influence and of being influenced; a sense of individual identity as a member of the community; awareness of a “common social identity” (ibid.) and identification with the community; and a strong emotional connection to other community members. In SVOC, the sense of a communitarian identity is highlighted in relation to traditional communities. On the other hand, the element of needs fulfilment as conceptualised by McMillan and Chavis (1986) is not taken into account in measuring SVOC, as it is considered an antecedent to the sense of community rather than a component (Koh and Kim 2003, 77; Tonteri et al. 2011, 2216). While a univocal conceptualisation of SVOC and a related measuring index have not yet been established, such an update is necessary to identify the elements that trigger perceptions of PSOC in online group members. Obst, Zinkiewicz, and Smith (2002a, 2002b) highlighted the importance of identification as a marker of PSOC in their study on the science fiction community, integrating various measuring scales in order to have an accurate reading of PSOC in fandom. The output of their study suggests that, despite the limitations of such a wide and scattered international community, with no geographic point of reference nor a strong face-to-face component, its members feel high levels of PSOC, with no substantial differences “[emerging] between fans whose major contact with other fans was face-to-face and those whose contact was text-based” (2002a, 97). This suggests that lack of a physical location does not have a

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negative influence on the strength of the relationship among community members nor on the identification of the individual fans as members of the community. Interestingly enough, study participants were also tested for PSOC in their geographical communities, and it was found that levels of PSOC were generally higher for the community of interest; the very nature of fandom as a relational community may be the explanation for such results, which may, “be due to greater levels of perceived choice of membership and to ties between members based on common interest” (Obst, Zinkiewicz, and Smith 2002b, 115). It can thus be said that fandom and fan groups have a very strong pull on their active participants, who feel they are effective members of a community and give importance to the social and participatory fan activities that support and cultivate the community. The fandom subculture is also characterised by “the use of groupspecific abbreviations, jargon, and language routines” (Herring 2004, 15; see also Cassel and Tverski 2005), which also has the function of distinguishing fans from non-fans and identifying different fandoms as well as subsections of specific fandoms, such as fans of a particular character/singer/player or a fictional couple. Some of these terms came into use at the dawn of modern fandom, such as “BNF (Big Name Fan) or fanboy” (Coppa 2006, 43, emphasis in original), which still exist “nowadays along more recent coinages” (ibid.) that emerged after the major shift of fandom towards virtual environments. The website www.fanlore.org, a wiki5 site dedicated to fandom and fan practices, includes over one thousand pages in the glossary category. The large number of terms and expressions can be explained if we consider that many refer to a specific aspect of a specific fandom (e.g. Kneen 2012). The use of a shared linguistic repertoire within fandom establishes a barrier between fans and non-fans: as Jenkins points out, “fan slang draws a sharp contrast between the “mundane”—the realm of everyday experience and/or those who dwell exclusively within that space—and fandom” (2006a, 42); at the same time, it reinforces the sense of group awareness in the community. Fannish language is used extensively in both the social and creative practices that fans engage in, as will be seen in the following sections.

5

“A type of web page designed so that its content can be edited by anyone who accesses it, using a simplified markup language,” “wiki, n.,” OED Online. December 2013. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/267577?redirectedFrom=wiki. Accessed July 20, 2016.

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1.4 Social Practices Members of a fan community have many ways of engaging with other fans and expressing their association with a given community. The most essential expression of fans’ enunciative productivity, as theorised by Fiske (1992), is, as described above, fan talk, which was earlier defined as discussion and debate on the chosen texts and association of its content to the fans’ lived experience and historical-political context. Fan talk can occur in a variety of different ways and through different media—face-toface or long-distance, printed or virtual, oral or written—in different combinations.

1.4.1 Offline and face-to-face activities The association of fans into fan clubs is one of the most popular social practices of the pre-internet era that survives today. Fan clubs may be official, that is, endorsed by a singer’s record label or a TV show’s producers, or created and sustained exclusively by fans both in financial and organisational terms (Bacon-Smith 1992, 8). In her study of European fan clubs dedicated to Italian singer Angelo Branduardi, Tedeschi (2003, 59) identified four main functions that make up fan club activities: finding information, to which fans participate deliberately and spontaneously. This is tightly intertwined with the second function, fan communication at an international level. Clubs function as hubs and gathering points for the information collected by the fans, which are then shared with the rest of the community. This ensures a continuous flow of information and communication among fans. The third function includes communication with official sources: many fan clubs also exist as privileged channels of communication with singers, players, actors, and so on, and may organise and promote conventions and meetings with people involved in the creation of the primary texts. The fourth activity consists of the production of content in the form of fanzines (zines) or, increasingly, websites. Zines, whose popularity is now fading in favour of internet sources, which are more easily accessible and immediate, were a staple of fandom in the pre-internet era (Verba 2003; Coppa 2006). The quality of these self-produced publications varied dramatically as it depended on which materials and equipment fans had access to: sometimes they were “hand-typed, photocopied, and stapled, other times offset printed and commercially bound” (H. Jenkins 1992a, 42). The most fundamental characteristic of the zine is its social function, achieved on its pages through the publication of fan letters and articles,

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which in turn encourage responses from other readers. The tone of these publications is very personal, as the personality of the creators—and external contributors, where that is the case—“reverberates throughout the entire document” (Wright 2001, 47). Indeed, contrary to professionally produced magazines, zine content is decided entirely by the creator, who has no deadlines to meet and might publish issues at irregular intervals. The content is also variable; for zines dedicated to television shows, Jenkins (1992) identifies two main categories: letterzines, which collect short articles and letters written by contributors, and fictionzines, which as the word itself says publish works of fiction, both prose and poetry, inspired by multiple aspects of the primary text (Jenkins 1992a, 42). Generally, zines also include fan-made artwork and pictures (Verba 2003; Tedeschi 2003; Guschwan 2012). Some zines have expanded to the point that they acquired a barcode and are sold next to professional publications in bookstores (Rowe 2012), but for the vast majority of fanzine productions, distribution occurs, sometimes internationally, through traditional mail to subscribers; they can also be found at conventions where they are sold or exchanged for other zines, even if nowadays many fanzines are produced directly in digital format and circulated via the internet. The advent of home computers and the popularisation of the internet have provided fans with an alternative point of access to fandom and to many fan practices, effectively eliminating the long waiting times of regular mail.

1.4.2 The internet era By fostering prolonged and regular contact among fans, computermediated communication (CMC) has now become the “major communication channel” (Obst, Zinkiewicz, and Smith 2002a, 93) for many fans and fan groups, whose members may never meet each other face-to-face because of geographical distance. As was seen, fan communities exist and thrive online despite not being grounded in a physical location, which does not impair the formation and successful maintenance of strong social ties among its members, nor the degree of individual identification within the community. In the 1990s, the most popular and common means of communication among fans was Usenet, a global network that connected millions of people in over 40 countries, allowing them to engage in public discussions about different topics, including fandom. Each group is known as a newsgroup. Baym’s year-long (1993) study about soap opera fans interacting on a

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Usenet group shed light on a number of aspects of fan interaction and the processes that ensure the successful functioning and maintenance of a virtual community. Similar to Usenet, listserv® groups, mailing lists, and Bulletin Board Systems also allowed discussions on multiple topics via electronic mail (Wakefield 2001). These modes of interaction were very popular among fans through the 1990s and early 2000s: for example, the mailing list platform offered by Yahoo!, known as Yahoo!groups, still active to this day, hosted a plethora of fandom-related groups. The popularity of this CMC mode has faded in later years, overtaken by webbased social platforms such as discussion forums. All of these modes are said to be asynchronous; that is, interaction does not occur in real time, with a lag of varying time between messages. Fan talk can also occur in real time in chatrooms, which are considered a synchronous CMC mode. One of the downsides of internet communication is anonymity, as real names are rarely used online and the lack of physical presence eliminates visual recognition of other community members. A distinct online identity is expressed through alternative means, primarily a screen name, used in most of the CMC genres mentioned so far. The signatures at the bottom of e-mails “usually have a name, affiliation, e-mail address, and quotation of some sort” (Baym 1993, 168), while forum signatures, especially in later years, are more likely to include personalised graphics and images alongside text, which makes them recognisable at first glance. Writing style, use of emoticons, and formatting are other individualising elements of users, and also play particular roles within the fan group. The higher degree of anonymity and lack of face-to-face interactions may lower inhibitions and open discussion to tension among members; minor disagreements may result in “flaming,”6 which is the act of posting hostile and offensive messages to other users. Retaliation by the addressee may start a “flame war.” For these reasons, mailing lists and forums almost always have an administrator, which is usually the creator and manager of the group, who monitors the discussion and intervenes to chastise or even sanction the behaviour with a temporary suspension from group activity or, in extreme cases, a permanent ban. Due to the greater number of messages and parallel topics found in discussion forums, administrators are often not alone in enforcing forum rules: a number of users, known as 6

“To rant, argue, or harangue, esp. via an electronic medium (such as e-mail or postings to a newsgroup); to send an inflammatory, abusive, or (esp. in early use) inconsequential e-mail or posting, usually as a hasty response or in a rapid, angry exchange.” “flame, v.,” OED Online, December 2013, Oxford University Press, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/71018?rskey=cACSCP&result=2&isAdvanced =false.

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moderators, are given additional powers within the forum and perform the same monitoring tasks. While “the community’s primary mission is as a forum for publicly negotiating … interpretations” (Baym 1993, 157), discussion on mailing lists may stray from the topic at hand and turn to real-life issues, with participants sharing personal information. Selfdisclosure may occur in unlurkings7 or new member presentations, or in relation to topics raised in the primary texts, in which case it can be “highly personal” (ibid., 168). Personal narratives enhance and encourage fan talk and interpretation of the primary texts, especially in television, movie, and literary fandom, but they also contribute to reducing the degree of anonymity of the mailing list and allow posters to build social ties that go beyond common fandom interests. Indeed, Baym points out that “the personalism brought into the group thus not only allows for richer interpretations, but also allows the group to function as a supportive community in which people are able to share their own experience” (ibid., 169).

1.4.2.1 Blogging and Microblogging A more personal approach to fan talk, where the fan identity exists alongside and overlaps with the fan’s real life to a higher degree, is constituted by blogging. A blog—an abbreviation of weblog—allows users to write posts as well as write and receive comments on their and other people’s posts, making it a prominently monologic genre but with a strong interactional aspect. Blogs may have a variety of purposes: they may be “topic-oriented weblogs, alternative viewpoints, astute examinations of the human condition as reflected by mainstream media, short-form journals, links to the weird, and free-form notebooks of ideas” (Blood 2000). Multimedia content (links, images and graphics, videos) can be posted alongside text in both posts and comments, providing fans with an additional means to share information and content other than traditional mailing lists. Fans usually run personal blogs that present themselves as online diaries (Baron 2008, 110) where the blogger’s personal life is discussed alongside fannish interests. Here, we can list Pitas, Blogger, and LiveJournal (LJ)—the latter “began to be widely adopted across fandom around 2003” (Coppa 2006, 57).

7

Lurkers are members of a given online group who read contributions by others but do participate in conversation. Unlurking occurs when such members finally decide to disclose themselves and become active members.

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One of the major factors of attraction for fans can be found in the social-oriented tools offered by the LJ system. The high degree of personalisation typical of blogs associated with multiple socially oriented tools peculiar to this platform allows for the formation and maintenance of strong social ties among fan bloggers. Indeed, as Miller and Shepherd (2004) point out, “many bloggers see blogging as a way of developing relationships … with an online community.” The LJ system has a profile page that lists the personal information bloggers decide to share with others. The commenting system, which is a common feature of blogs, is also a strong tool for relationship and community building: “other users can leave a comment, express agreement or disagreement, provide feedback about the post or additional information; the blogger may leave a comment, too, usually to respond to his/her readers/commenters” (Vettorel 2014, 40). LJ offers its users the opportunity to create, in addition to personal blogs, community blogs, which individuals can either monitor, that is read community posts or join, which gives them posting privileges. Communities on LJ exist on a plethora of topics, from travel to cuisine to knitting to a variety of aspects of fandom, including both fan talk and the sharing of official and fan-produced material: blog users themselves, when interrogated about blogs, highlight the importance of the communitarian aspect of this practice (Boyd 2006). LJ had its golden era in the mid-2000s, but its role as fandom hub has declined in more recent years due to the competition of other blogging platforms, such as Dreamwidth,8 and the emergence of new blogging tools with a higher level of multimodality than traditional platforms, known as microblogging. The most popular platform of this type among fans is Tumblr.9 In contrast to traditional blogging, which allows multimodality but is prevalently text based, “microblogging lets users share brief blasts of information to friends and followers from multiple sources including web sites, third-party applications, or mobile devices” (DeVoe 2009, 212). The interface makes it easy to upload multimedia content and share content posted by others. Fans can therefore circulate both official and fanproduced texts among themselves through the act of reblogging. While Tumblr. is highly multimodal, with a prominence of posts including graphics, text posts are not uncommon in fandom blogs, as fan fiction is also shared. As was seen in this section, fans have many venues to express their fannish identity, and the internet has provided them with a moredirect channel to communicate, often internationally, with like-minded 8 9

http://www.dreamwidth.org. Accessed July 20, 2016. www.tumblr.com. Accessed July 20, 2016.

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individuals. The internet has encouraged and fostered fan creative practices, as sharing their materials digitally is much faster and easier than sending parcels by mail or travelling to a convention; furthermore, the web offers fans a much wider audience for their own creations.

1.5 Creative Practices Fan talk and enunciative productivity are two of the strongest tenets of fan culture acting as a cohesive glue within fan community as a whole and in individual fan groups, enhancing and sustaining the pleasure of partaking in the original texts. However, fan “meaning and interpretations” (H. Jenkins 1992b, 214) are not expressed exclusively through social interaction and discussion; fans draw from the original texts and rework them in order to produce entirely new, creative texts that still have their roots in the original material: “fandom here becomes a participatory culture which transforms the experience of media consumption into the production of new texts” (H. Jenkins 1992a, 46). The activity of manipulating and reworking existing texts is also known as remixing, which is defined as taking “cultural artifacts and [combining and manipulating] them into new kinds of creative blends” (Knobel and Lankshear 2008, 22). The concept of remixing was originally associated with the practice of reworking the elements of a music track to produce a different version or mix; more recently, the term has undergone semantic expansion and is now used to refer, in addition to music, to moving and still images taken from various sources, including movies and television (ibid.). While remixing is not exclusively associated with fan practices and creation, the term can be used to describe the process by which fans use elements drawn from material they have not authored themselves in order to create new meanings and interpretations. These texts, as we have seen in part, can take a number of different forms: Fans write short stories, poems, and novels which use the characters and situations of the primary text as a starting point for their own fiction. Fans take found footage from television texts and edit them to construct their own videos which comment, sometimes with irony, sometimes in celebration, on the programs which gave them birth. Fan artists paint pictures, construct sculptures, or fashion elaborate costumes. Fan musicians record and market tapes of their performances. (H. Jenkins 1992b, 212)

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The appropriation of such elements from the primary texts (characters, settings, storylines, etc.) results from the deep attachment fans feel towards the chosen texts, which leads them to behave as if they have a certain degree of ownership of the text they adore. However, they are aware that the original texts “do not belong to them, and that someone else has the power to do things to those characters that are in direct contradiction to [their] own cultural interests” (ibid., 24). Producers and writers of the original texts, especially in television fandom, may elicit very strong reactions from fan audiences, from “worshipful deference” to “hostility and anger” when the producers’ authority over the official narratives acts against the fans’ desires (ibid.). Often, creative practices have the purpose of “fixing” actions or events occurring in the original texts and expressing the fans’ rejection of the official view imposed by the text authors. In addition, they may support alternative readings that are not contemplated within the original discourse. Fans elaborate collectively on the content they are offered; they speculate and make assumptions that “push well beyond its explicit information” (ibid., 155). They might focus on a peripheral detail that is irrelevant or only tangential to the main text and expand on it until it takes on a life of its own and becomes part of the text’s fanon.10 On the other hand, some aspects of a given text can be entirely foregone in alternative readings if they are considered irrelevant or even conflicting with the preferred fan narrative. Discussion emerging from fan talk provides fertile ground for the creation of alternative texts inspired by the original material. Jenkins (1992a, 162–76) offers a detailed outline of the most common strategies of text reworking adopted by fans. While his account refers specifically to fan fiction and television shows, many of these strategies can also be identified in other types of fan texts, such as graphic arts, videos, and less-common artistic practices. The strategy of “recontextualization” consists of “filling the gaps” in the original narrative; where the primary source fails to give a clear explanation for an event or character behaviour, fans take over, offering detailed accounts of what occurred in the background of the original material and clarifying any element that might not add up in the original text. Recontextualization is also used as a starting point for a more indepth analysis of the motives underlying the actions of a given character within the narrative. The practice defined as “expanding the timeline” can be related to recontextualization but has a major difference: the events created in such 10

Fanon, a portmanteau word of fan and canon, is used to refer to fan readings that are not part of the original text, but are widely spread and accepted in the fan community and are sometimes incorporated in the actual canon (Coker 2012, 86).

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fan texts precede or succeed the canon. These texts either focus on character backgrounds, once again filling in the gaps in the character’s past life that may in turn clarify events occurring in the primary text’s present, or present a hypothetical future for the characters that generally does not contradict the events unfolding in the primary text. “Refocalization” consists of shifting the central focus from the text’s canonical protagonists to peripheral characters, who, for one reason or another, have raised the interest of a group of fans. This practice, H. Jenkins states (1992a, 166–7), involves often female and minority characters who receive less attention and consideration in male-centred texts. Often disappointed by the lack of attention towards these characters and their characterisation, fans make the effort of exploring their psychology, providing explanations for behaviour inconsistencies or placing them in the limelight in fan-created material. The strategy of “moral realignment” consists in subverting the moral structure of the original text; the protagonists of the primary source, usually identified as good, may turn evil in fan-produced text, and vice versa when dealing with villains. Alternatively, villains may retain their evil nature in the fan-text, but their motives and background might be explored in more depth. “Genre shifting” consists of creating different readings of a given text by reworking the original material within “alternative generic traditions” (ibid., 169). The possibilities here are endless; any given text can be reworked within a plethora of different genres, “including mythic adventure, courtroom drama, mystery and spy intrigue” (ibid.). The latter type of reworking is known within fandom as “alternative universe” (AU). “Crossovers” occur when two separate primary texts are blended together to a certain degree; a character or characters from one text may be inserted within another existing fictional universe, regardless of their original media source (literature, cinema, television, etc.). Other texts may be merged because of common characteristics, such as genre or geographical setting. Like genre shifting, character dislocation is closely related to the category of AUs, and it occurs when characters are placed in a different context than the original text and assume different identities. Characters may appear in a different historical or geographical context, or they may play a much different role. Often, character dislocation and genre shifting occur together. “Personalization” is a strategy especially typical of fan writing, maybe more so than previous strategies which are commonly applied to other types of fan practices. Personalization “efface[s] the gap that separates the

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realm of their own experience and their fictional space of their favourite program” (ibid., 171), including, in the established universe of the primary text, an original character identifiable as the embodiment of the author. This concept will be expanded upon later. All the strategies presented above are better exploited in fan writing than other media, as the written medium, unconstrained by the need for technologic equipment and raw materials such as pictures and videos, allows for a much deeper exploration of the topics and issues involved in these strategies. These can nonetheless be expressed by other media by making use of other semiotic resources, as will be seen in the following sections.

1.5.1 Fan art According to the wiki site Fanlore, the current definition of fan art indicates “any amateur art for a specific TV show, movie, book, or other media event not owned or created by the artist,11” and it generally includes art “that is drawn or painted either traditionally or digitally.” Fan art may also include videos which, due to the wide range of different creation practices, will be analysed as their own category. The world of fan art is indeed wide and diverse. The oldest type of fan art is identifiable in traditional and then digital drawings, which appeared in print zines alongside articles and fan fiction (Verba 2003) either as standalone art or as cover art for the stories. Both drawings and photo manipulations can convey the author’s feelings and opinions about a specific aspect of a show: they might focus on a relationship, or illustrate visually an alternative universe, with characters plunged into entirely new contexts thanks to the author’s ability to use image-editing programs. Such images can be created for different purposes, they “can be used as fan fiction covers, banners, and illustrations” and “can stand on their own as individual artworks.”12 Collaboration between fan writers and fan artists has been very fruitful since the print zine era, and fan fiction covers created by the author themselves or by another fan are not uncommon. Indeed, drawings and manipulations are very apt at recreating the remixed universes described in the fan fiction and enhance the reading experience with a visual complement. Visual narratives, however, can be expanded beyond a single illustration into fan comics. They may be realised in various genres, from 11 12

http://fanlore.org/wiki/Fanart. Accessed July 20, 2016. http://fanlore.org/wiki/Manip. Accessed July 20, 2016.

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comic strips to the graphic novel and with a wide range of styles and techniques. A special role in the category of fan art is held by banners and especially icons. Banners are images, generally of rectangular form, that fans use in their websites, blogging profiles, or forum signatures in order to signal affiliation with a fandom or with a sub-group within the fandom itself (support for a relationship, appreciation for a character, and so on). Banners and icons, more than other types of fan art, are pre-eminently enunciative as they are created with the explicit intention of conveying an aspect of the user’s fannish identity. Icons are small images, usually square, that are used as the visual identification of a user on a specific communicative platform, such as discussion forums, instant messaging clients, and blogging platforms, where icon-creation has developed into an art form. As with banners, icons become part of the fan’s identity, and contribute to creating “identity and rapport in a virtual environment” (Rebaza 2008, 10). They can be used for various purposes, for example banners may have the function to express one of the many facets of a fan’s identity; however, they may also act as additional forms of expression of a user’s thought or opinion, contingent to a particular post or comment. Animated gifs, on the other hand, have grown exponentially in popularity in recent years and are very frequently seen in social networking sites such as Tumblr., where they are widely used by fans to create alternative visual readings for their chosen texts. Microblogging has therefore contributed to the emergence of fan practices that display a very high degree of multimodality. Among fan works, the creation of audio-visual works has become a very popular practice, especially in more recent years due to the already mentioned developments in technology that have resulted in easier access to the necessary equipment for the creation of quality products in digital format, as well as broadband internet, which is now the main circulation channel for fan videos. Fan videos remain to this day tributes to the source texts, and an efficient and sophisticated medium to propose alternative readings of the text. Indeed, as Jenkins states, “the pleasure of the form centers on the fascination in watching familiar images wrenched free from their previous context and assigned alternative meanings” (H. Jenkins 1992a, 227). The next section will go into more depth on the fan practice par excellence, unconstrained by any technological and financial barriers: textual practices, and above all fan fiction.

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1.5.2 Written practices Fan fiction is the most popular written practice in fandom but it is not the only one fans engage in. Written creativity is expressed through a variety of activities. We can mention “filking”—that is, fan-music making— which defines the art of writing songs inspired by fandom-related topics, especially in science-fiction fandom. The transformative nature of filking is not limited to the remix of media texts, as it also draws elements and “tunes scavenged from popular or folk music, frequently with a keen awareness of the meanings that arise from their careful juxtaposition” (H. Jenkins 1992a, 252). Other practices involve creative writing in prose, such as in fan fiction, but are intended as collective and collaborative activities. Role playing Games (RPGs), for example, consist of fans assuming the identities of characters from a given primary text and interacting with other fan-played characters, creating an improvised narrative that the poster has no complete control over, but shifts and takes shape according to the way characters interact among themselves. RPGs do not necessarily adhere to the primary text canon; the creative strategies illustrated by H. Jenkins (1992a) can be applied to RPG groups as well. Another collaborative fiction practice is constituted by round-robins; here, participants take turns in writing paragraphs of a story, with each writer free to steer the story in the desired direction while abiding by the group rules. Round-robins may have pre-decided subjects or plot guidelines, or participants may shape the plot as they go along and build on other people’s contributions. These practices, however, are not as popular as fan fiction writing.

1.6 Fan Fiction Fan fiction is arguably the most popular form of fan-text interpretation through creativity: “fans interpret these texts through discussion and formal analysis, but also through the creative act of writing fan fiction” (Kaplan 2006, 135; Gilliam 2002; Derecho 2006; Doctorow 2007). Meggers’ survey, addressed to fans, received 485 responses suggesting that involvement with the practice of fan fiction is extremely popular and can occur in a variety of ways and degrees. Indeed, her data appears to show that: the majority of fans in the current study reported having read fanfction (99.3%) and most considered “fanfiction reader” an active part of their fandom identity (96.6%). Approximately 81% of the sample had reviewed or commented on fanfiction directly to an author, 54% had recommended

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fanfiction to other readers, 40% had served as a beta reader at least once, and 60% had authored at least one piece of fanfiction. (Meggers 2012, 59)

Alternative readings that emerge and are discussed in fan talk are then transposed into fan fiction “that plays into that interpretive and critical activity” (Willis 2006, 151). “Fan fiction, then, is generated first of all by a practice of reading which, rather than expressing its latent meanings, reorients a canonical text, opening its fictional world onto a set of demands determined by the individual reader and her knowledge of the (fictional and non-fictional) world(s)” (ibid., 155, emphasis in original). Fan fiction, more than other fan works, is a direct transposition of fan interpretations, which are acted out by the characters in these stories; here, the exploration and analysis of these alternative readings can reach a depth and degree of detail and character introspection that are not as easily achievable through images and video. The reorientation of such texts, however, is not exclusively a process of appropriation and manipulation of pop cultural elements; fan texts are “imbued with meanings that are grounded in the lived realities and social worlds of fans” (Black 2008, 14). Themes and topics that are dear to fans may be expanded within these stories by introducing situations that will force the characters to deal with such subjects, either from a serious or satirical perspective. The fan’s personal narratives become embedded in the fictional universe, creating alternative readings which are then shared with fandom, and in turn discussed and renegotiated through reader feedback. Fan fiction will be explored in more detail in chapter three.

1.7 Intertextuality in Fan Practices The social and productive practices described in the sections above provide a variety of opportunities for fans to engage in their communities in an increasingly globally oriented and productive way. By participating in fandom and creating new, multimodal texts based on pre-existing material, fans engage in active reading and take from the text “only those things that are useful or pleasurable to [them]” (H. Jenkins 1992a, 24). Fans are therefore characterised as textual poachers, as they take specific elements of pop cultural media texts and manipulate them according to their own aims and interests. Jenkins, however, specifies that poaching does not entail a misreading of the original text; on the contrary, it describes a process of appropriation first and reworking later, which results in meaning making and subsequent negotiation within the community, in accordance with the fluidity and continuous evolution of fan interpretivity (H. Jenkins 1992a, 32). For this reason, Jenkins

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conceives fans as nomadic readers (De Certeau 1984), never constrained by a single text or a specific interpretation of it, but in perennial negotiation and creation of new interpretations and meaning, moving from text to text, appropriating elements from them and creating entirely new material, interlaced and glued together with the fan’s own experience in real life and within the fan community. As Jwa reiterates, the “ways in which the writer treats the original discourse in fanfictions relates to his or her particular stance towards the world, a stance which informs about the writer’s thinking” (Jwa 2012, 328); while the author’s reasoning is concerned specifically with the practice of fan fiction writing, it can be extended to encompass all the creative fan practices giving life to new narrative texts. Analogously to fan talk, fan texts have the primary aim to enhance and deepen the connection with the primary text and the pleasure derived from the reception of the original material. The creative practices fans engage in to create new texts, which also occur through the strategies of reworking theorised by H. Jenkins (1992a) and illustrated in section 1.5, “make intertextuality visible because they rely on readers’ ability to see relationships between the fan-writer’s stories and the original media sources” (Chandler-Olcott and Mahar 2003, 562–3). The intertextual nature of fan practices was brought to attention in the earliest days of fan studies, when Jenkins used as the cover art of his book Textual Poachers a fan-made print depicting Star Trek: The Next Generation characters in a medieval setting, reminiscent of a chivalric romance: “[f]ans, like other customers of popular culture, read intertextually as well as textually and their pleasure comes through the particular juxtapositions that they create between specific … content and other cultural materials” (H. Jenkins 1992a, 37). The notion of intertextuality is indeed observable in fan practices, where the source text STx, the distributed official text, is re-read and reworked by fans, who in turn produce a series of fan texts FTns that embed a number of varying elements drawn from STx. However, fan texts may also be somewhat related to either another ST, as in the case of explicit crossovers, and/or to one or more FTns, when recurring fanon elements are included in the FT, with multiple levels of intertextuality in a single text. In fan studies, intertextuality has been analysed primarily in relation to fan fiction (Chandler-Olcott and Mahar 2003; Black 2005b; Xu 2011), but it is a core element of all fan practices across media. Narrative elements are taken from the ST, which might be a written, audiovisual, or interactive audiovisual (videogame) product, and are reworked and included within the FT, which may in turn be a written, graphic, or audiovisual text, resulting in a variety of potential combinations. As Allen

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points out, “intertextuality reminds us that all texts are potentially plural, reversible, open to the reader’s own presuppositions” (2000, 209), and fans, as active audiences, enhance their engagement with their texts of their choice via the deliberate reworking of the source material in accordance with their own thoughts and alternative readings, elaborated collectively through previous social and productive fan activities (Bird 2011). This concept is reiterated by Chandler-Olcott and Mahar in relation to fan fiction, but it is easily extendable to all fans engaging in productive practices aimed at creating new, alternative fictional narratives: “writers position themselves in a mix of at least two textually identifiable units of discourse: the original source and the writer’s own history or imagination” (2003, 328). The notion of intertextuality is also applicable to fandom in the light of its massive presence online. The interconnectivity of fandom, as will be seen, travels along online communication modes and hypertextuality, where the latter term does not refer to Genette’s (1982) conceptualisation of intertextuality but to its application “to computer-based digitalized textuality” (Allen 2000, 200; see also Orr 2003, 50). Even when they are not producing new, intertextual narratives, fans employ intertextuality when they engage in social practices online, interacting with hypertexts, that is “texts with a range of other texts embedded within [them], access to which is made by links activated by the reader … moving beyond strict ‘read-only’ systems to active systems which turn the reader into not only a potential ‘reader-author’ but also a collaborative ‘worker’” (Allen 2000, 204). Intertextuality is a key concept of the theoretical notion of multiliteracies (New London Group 1996), which set out to highlight a number of issues emerging as a result of processes of globalisation and digitalisation that should be taken into account in relation to literacy pedagogy. While this perspective will not be adopted for the purposes of this study, it was deemed important to include a mention of this field of study at least in the measure in which fandom-related activities are involved, especially in relation to fan fiction and Second Language Acquisition (SLA), as research carried out in this respect has provided useful insights in relation to the topic of my study.

1.8 Fandom and the Classroom As online fandom activities are carried out through computer-mediated communication (CMC), attention to such practices has also come from a pedagogical perspective; indeed, the educational value of internet

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communication and digital interactions has been explored in a multiplicity of aspects over the past two decades. The theoretical notion of multiliteracies (New London Group 1996) has been useful in exploring and analysing the new challenges and communication media introduced by technological advancements and the diffusion of the internet. The concept indeed describes “the multiplicity of communication channels and media, and the increasing saliency of cultural and linguistic diversity” (ibid., 63). As the authors remark, “multiliteracies also create a different kind of pedagogy, one in which language and other modes of meaning are dynamic representational resources, constantly being remade by their users as they work to achieve their various cultural purposes” (64). The notion of multiliteracies has been developed in the tradition of New Media Literacies (NMLs), which may be defined as a “set of cultural competencies and social skills that young people need to be capable of performing adequately in 21st century labour, citizenship, and selfactualization” (Alvarez et al. 2013, 368). Indeed, as H. Jenkins et al. claim, “participatory culture shifts the focus of literacy from individual expression to community involvement. The new literacies almost all involve social skills developed through collaboration and networking. These skills build on the foundation of traditional literacy and research, technical, and critical-analysis skills learned in the classroom” (2009, xiii). The exploration of such emergent practices and their potential influence on classroom education has been carried out on multiple aspects of CMC (e.g. Ito et al. 2009), including fandom. Fan studies have been producing: a growing body of scholarship [that] suggests potential benefits from these forms of participatory culture, including opportunities for peer-to-peer learning, a changed attitude toward intellectual property, the diversification of cultural expression, the development of skills valued in the modern workplace, and a more empowered conception of citizenship. (ibid., xii)

Lankshear and Knobel (2006), for example, have reviewed a number of emerging practices linked with the remixing and manipulation of existing texts, including fandom-oriented activities such as the creation of music videos, fan art, and fan fiction, as well as amateur subtitling. The pedagogical potential of Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games (MMORPGs) has also been investigated, such as Second Life (e.g. Childress and Braswell 2006) and World of Warcraft (WoW) (e.g. Dongping, Newgarden, and Young 2012; Peterson 2012). In his paper about teaching fan studies in higher education, Booth refers to the use of fan practices in the classroom as “an exemplary pedagogical tool” (2012, 175). Geraghty reports about the enthusiasm of his postgraduate students

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in writing their own fan fiction in a fan studies class, while having “to write critically about the practice of fan fiction and contextualize it within a history of media fandom” (2012, 165). Similarly, Delwiche required his undergraduate students to engage in the fantasy MMORPG Everquest as a requirement for his ethnography of Massively Multiplayer On-line Roleplaying Games (2006, 163). However, the use of fandom-related practices in pedagogical contexts is not limited to higher education environments, as a supplement to the study of fandom as an academic subject, but is also found at other education levels: attention has been given especially to the adolescent age group, which is most likely to engage in such practices online. Lachney (2012), working in a middle-school context, underlines the usefulness of fandom as a tool to incorporate in curricula to facilitate the acquisition of the necessary competences and skills for them “to become cultural participants in 21st century media ecologies” (2012, 189). The studies illustrated above all take a broader approach to the pedagogical uses of fandom, involving fan videos as well as wikis. Within this framework, fan fiction is often seen as an aid to the acquisition of both new media competencies and skills, and “of traditional literacy skills in formal and informal settings” (Lachney 2012, 191). Indeed, a number of these studies are primarily concerned with the use of CMC and fandom as a vehicle of language learning. In Thorne and Black’s words, “qualitative shifts in communicative contexts, purposes, and genres of language use associated with new media necessitate a responsive and proactive vision of educational practice, particularly in the areas of first and additional language instruction” (2007, 133–4). A number of fandom-related studies have been carried out in this respect (e.g. Lam 2000, 2004; 2006; Duff 2002; Black 2005a, 2008, 2009b; Dongping, Newgarden, and Young 2012; Peterson 2012). Black (2005a), especially in relation to younger students, points out that the emotional investment fan fiction writers put in their stories results in a higher engagement in such activities. The concept is reiterated by Macklem, who states that “letting students write something that they are already fans of—that they are already passionate about—is one way of engaging them and those around them in the writing process” (2012, 208–9). Within the fan fiction community, non-native writers have access to “peer review, constructive criticism, and collaboration within the community” that “scaffold them toward more sophisticated practices and provide them with safe and unintimidating access to the many resources of this writing community” (Black 2005b, 125). Black has similarly noticed a tendency in the fan fiction community to focus on function rather than

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form; that is, on the content of the fan fiction rather than on the language used.13 This concept, explored here in pedagogical terms, will be analysed later in more detail within the framework of English as a Lingua Franca studies (chapter two). Another point of similarity can be found in the concept of internet-mediated intercultural second-language education (ICL2E), which is based “on the notion that transnational dialogue and other forms of interaction can foster productive, and within the otherwise confined spaces of instructed foreign language classrooms, perhaps even necessary, conditions for developing intercultural communicative competence” (Thorne and Black 2007, 138). While, as will be seen, the importance of intercultural communicative ability is equally highlighted in the ELF framework, the nature of ICL2E research does not however focus on the use of a shared common language for international communication. In ICL2E, the term “intercultural communication” refers to the interaction between two groups of learners whose pedagogical aim is to learn each other’s language (ibid., 138). ICL2E has adopted a variety of digital modes as technological means to create a virtual link between students, for example, newsgroup discussions (Cononelos and Oliva 1993), discussion forums (Basharina, 2007), and chats (Belz 2003). As will be seen in the next chapter, however, the aim of this study is not directly linked to the acquisition of one specific L2; fandom, and specifically fan fiction, will be seen here as comprising an environment of authentic language use where the engagement of fans with productive written practices in English occurs as the result of the will to participate and be active members in an international, cosmopolitan community which uses English as its working language.

1.9 From Fandom to English This chapter has attempted to provide an overview of the social dynamics and practices involved with the frenetic universe of fandom. A definition of fans was given that aimed at highlighting the characteristics that make media and pop culture enthusiasts stand out against regular audience members. Emphasis was put on the modality of reception of the media texts; on how the adoration of the original material is not limited to a passive, mindless enjoyment of a content that is imposed from above, but, on the contrary, becomes a dialogic process between the source text, the individual fan, and the fan community. Fans have been presented as active 13

While this is a common point in the two approaches, the initial theoretical frameworks and research aims are ultimately different.

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consumers who renegotiate the source material in a variety of ways, from discussion of canon and subtext, with a consequent developing of alternative readings to artistic creativity. Here, the source text and its alternative readings become the starting point for the production of mediainspired texts, which were identified and described in terms of traditional and digital art, audio-visuals, and written works. Attention was paid to the projection of the fan’s self, desires, and fantasies into the writing of these stories, and of the idea of fan texts as an outlet for disadvantaged segments of society—women, minorities, homosexuals—to challenge, at least within fan communities, the traditional, mainstream view conveyed by the primary texts. Fan texts and fandom, therefore, give a voice to people who would not therefore have any in mainstream society. It was deemed important to mention the inherent intertextuality of social and productive fandom practices, as it highlights the interconnectivity of fandom as a result of processes of globalisation and digitalisation that have also affected the distribution of media for international consumption. “[T]he multiplicity of communications channels and media” and “the increasing salience of cultural and linguistic diversity” (Cope and Kalantzis 2000, 5) have been identified as key elements of the multiliteracies framework (Chandler-Olcott and Mahar 2003); that is, incorporating fandom elements in related pedagogical research. These two key elements are also distinctive of the contemporary fandom experience: the first was introduced in this chapter, while the second will be seen in more detail in the following chapters. A last note should indeed be made on the phenomenon of the internationalisation of fandom: increasing contact among global fans in virtual environments has led to the creation of international fan communities whose working language, for reasons that will be explored in detail in later chapters, is often the international language par excellence; namely English. Fans from all over the world may decide to publish their creations, especially fan fiction, in English in order to share them with a wider audience. This results in the projection of different cultures and languages in the material that is circulated in fandom, adding an extra layer to the ongoing renegotiation and dialogue within the community. The notion and characteristics of English in its Lingua Franca role will be discussed in the next chapter to clarify the role of non-native speakers (NNSs) of English in international fan-related contexts, and outline how both fandom and English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) allow their users to question orthodox perspectives and provide them with a space to express themselves as equal members of society.

CHAPTER TWO ENGLISH AS A LINGUA FRANCA, FANDOM, AND COMMUNITIES

2.1 The Role of English in Fandom As discussed in the previous chapter, the advent of the internet has turned fandom from a niche activity into a mass culture phenomenon with a high degree of internationalisation, due to the increased exportation of media from the source countries to the rest of the world. Translations, dubbings, and subtitling have contributed to the spread of media products to many countries, with the subsequent formation of fan groups who join the national and international fandoms of the source texts. DVDs, satellite TV technologies and streaming services, and online shopping allow audiences to come into contact with the source material without any linguistic and cultural mediation. Such alternative means of partaking in the text, including illegal1 means of acquiring materials, provide fans with access to material that is not officially distributed where they live. Even when products are distributed, there might be a significant gap in time before they reach some countries, and enthusiastic fans often do not have the patience to wait to see their favourite TV show/cartoon/anime (Japanese animation), leading to the development of a network of fan translators and subbers.2 These fans prepare fan-made subtitles upon the release of new audiovisual material and they try to stay as true to the source text as possible, since official dubs and subtitling often tend to adapt the language and content to the target culture, sometimes resulting in substantial differences from the original text. A clamorous example is the Italian adaptation of The Nanny, where Jewish, Queens-native Fran Fine became 1

For example, downloading copyright material by means of torrent or peer-to-peer software. 2 Subbers are fans who create subtitles for an audiovisual source text released in a different language than the first language of a group of fans. These fan-produced subtitles are known as fansubs. http://fanlore.org/wiki/Fansub, Accessed July 20, 2016.

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Francesca Cacace, an immigrant from central Italy. Where anime is concerned, censoring occurs quite often, leading to frustration among fans (Cubbison 2005; Dwyer and Uricaru 2009; see also Meng 2012 for Chinese fansubbers of Western material). Indeed, they do not content themselves with adapted and manipulated versions of the original texts that may satisfy regular members of the audience, but would rather partake of the original source text in a way that is true to the original, even where they are not familiar with the source language, as is often the case with material coming from Asian countries such as Japan and South Korea. Indeed, “fansubbing practices and distribution have emerged as the cornerstones of the anime fan community, providing the only means of trusted access to source material” (Dwyer and Uricaru 2009, 49). While fans gather face-to-face and online in environments where they interact in their L1 with members from their own speech community, regardless of the culture of origin of the source text, many fans also join international fan communities where fans from all over the world engage in fan talk and creative practices inspired by a specific source text. Such international environments have a working language of communication that—for a variety of reasons that will now be outlined—is overwhelmingly English. Modern fandom as it exists today originated in the 1920s in the United States thanks to science fiction aficionados. This is a notable reason for the widespread use of English in international fandom, as the language of the first fanzines and of many related practices was English. One of the main reasons for the strong presence of English as the language of international fandom communication is the dominance of English-speaking countries in the production of globally-distributed and renown popular media. Kooijman speaks of the omnipresence of American pop culture through media: “rather than a foreign commodity, American pop culture has become an intrinsic part of global pop culture, a continuous presence that often is no longer experienced as completely foreign” (Kooijman 2008, 13). Especially where movies are concerned, “a strong case can be made that America dominates world cinema. It may not make most feature films. But American films are the only ones that reach every market in the world.”3 In spite of a gradually increasing awareness of non-Western movie industries, such as Bollywood, and a niche market for European productions, American cinema remains undoubtedly the leader in worldwide theatres for output and popularity. The phenomenon might be somewhat less prominent in television and contemporary music and 3

“Culture wars,” The Economist. World History In Context, September 12, 1998, http://www.economist.com/node/164859. Accessed July 20, 2016.

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literature, but English-language products still play a prominent role outside their mother countries. As Crystal well illustrates (2003, 96ff.), the entertainment industry in general is English-language dominated. This, of course, has implications for the fans of such texts: despite the fact that “the strength of global yet American-style capitalism is its ability to incorporate diversity within mass production and mass consumption, and to do so in forms that are widely attractive to a broad range of consumers around the world” (Kooijman 2008, 12). These texts are rooted in a specific cultural and linguistic context that is the one from which the primary fandom inevitably emerges. Fans all over the world, aided by the international role of English and interested in partaking in unmediated versions of the text, join global fandoms where the language of interaction is at the same time the language of the source text and the language of international communication. The popularity of American (as well as British; for example, the long-running science fiction show Doctor Who) media is, in this case, the main reason for the widespread use of English in fandom and at the same time one of the factors, as described by Crystal (2003), that has facilitated the emergence of English as an international language in the years following World War II. Paradoxically, use of English as the lingua franca of international fandom is also linked to the thriving popularity, in recent years, of non-Western media, specifically Japanese pop culture which includes music, comics (manga), and animation (anime). Despite the mounting interest in the language and culture underlying these texts, very few international fans are able to communicate fluently in Japanese, and they tend to gather in international, global environments where the language of communication appears to be overwhelmingly English, and where bilingual fans tend to act as translators, forwarding news and information that is first released in Japanese. Bilingual fans also become subbers (Cubbison 2005, 48), providing the rest of the group a way to enjoy their favourite anime mere hours after the release of a new episode. Fan subbing, when compared to official adaptations of the material, tries to stay as true as possible to the source text, maintaining all the original names and distinctive cultural elements, although officiallydistributed texts tend to be manipulated to “westernise” them before being released to general audiences in Europe and the Americas (Cubbison 2005, 52). Indeed, “Japanese animation uses language, cultural information, narrative techniques and visual conventions that are foreign to Western viewers” (Cubbison 2005, 46). They are “generally seen as intended for an audience of children (whether or not they were created for this audience) and so are usually dubbed—as children’s reading skills may not be up to subtitles—and edited for age-appropriateness” (ibid.) This phenomenon is

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less noticeable in manga, where distinctive cultural elements, unfamiliar to Western audiences, may be briefly explained in footnotes. While manga and anime fan groups carry out their activities in different languages, the most-used language on websites, discussion forums, and in the vast majority of fan fiction dedicated to such media remains English. The situation is fostered by the scarce diffusion of fluent speakers of Japanese as a foreign language; the existing few may immerse themselves in the fandom stemming from the producing culture, and have privileged access to the source text and related information. Most fandom aficionados engage with the source text through a different language, one that is widely spoken internationally and allows communication both with the Japanese root fandom and other like-minded people from all over the world. That language, as anticipated, is English.

2.2 English as a Global Language and Lingua Franca English has spread to become a veritable language of international communication in many fields, from academia to business to tourism and leisure, and it is the most-studied foreign language in the world. It is now compulsory in many European countries to study English as a school subject, starting as early as elementary school (Graddol 2006, 92; Seidlhofer 2011, 2); an increasing number of universities require their students, regardless of their main area of study, to take an English exam or prove a certain degree of competence in English upon entry. Additionally, universities provide classes and programs in English to attract international students (Erling and Bartlett 2007; Mauranen, Hynninen, and Ranta 2010). “The worldwide spread of English, carefully described in several recent treatises, has continued from the early seventeenth century through different phases and under different circumstances, but … the most recent, explosive expansion could perhaps most reasonably be timed to coincide with the rise of the Internet” (Mauranen 2012, 3). Indeed, proficiency in English is often paired with computer skills as fundamental requirements for any citizen to be competitive in a global economy. More recently, emerging economic powers, such as China, have recognised the international value of English and, in preparation for the influx of tourists, athletes, and journalists expected for the 2008 Beijing summer Olympics, started to invest massively in English language education,4 increasing by 4

“Chinese Learn English for Olympics.” China Daily, January 16, 2008. http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/olympics/2008-01/16/content_6398343.htm. Accessed July 20, 2016.

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the millions the number of people learning and using English in the world (Crystal 2003; Burt 2005; Graddol 2006; J. Jenkins 2009a). This chapter will offer an overview of Lingua Franca English from a sociolinguistic perspective, first by introducing a working definition of ELF and illustrating a number of issues that this alternative perspective is attempting to address. ELF is then paired up with fandom as a postmodern phenomenon resulting from processes of globalisation. The modernist outlook will be problematised in several of its aspects, and alternative models will be proposed, highlighting the similarities of ELF and online fandom as postmodern concepts so as to introduce the reader to the analysis that will follow in later chapters.

2.2.1 Problematisation of the native speaker model One of the first scholars to provide a definition of ELF was Firth, who in a seminal 1996 paper described ELF as “a ‘contact language’ between persons who share neither a common native tongue nor a common (national) culture, and for whom English is the chosen foreign language of communication” (240, emphasis in original). Indeed, one of the distinctive characteristics of ELF studies is the focus on the role of English as a contact language in cross-cultural interactions. In such communicative events, English is disconnected from its primary linguacultural context and becomes a tool for communication, a vehicle for the transmission of content among people who do not share a common culture, nor are immersed in the Anglo-American culture with which English is traditionally affiliated. In Mauranen’s words, a “lingua franca is chosen as a matter of convenience or necessity, and interlocutors may know little of each other’s cultural backgrounds or be unfamiliar with Anglo-American cultures” (2012, 5). As a global lingua franca, involving diverse participants bringing different linguacultural backgrounds and repertoires to communicative events, ELF constitutes a shared vehicle of communication that may be shaped and adapted by its speakers for successful meaningmaking according to their needs: “ELF speakers, with their individual backgrounds and resources, contribute to a situational resource pool that varies according to the contextual characteristics of the interaction, in terms of both participants and setting” (Hülmbauer 2009, 325, emphasis in original). The extreme diversity and variability of ELF communicative contexts not only detach ELF from uses of English as a native language, but entail a certain degree of linguistic flexibility and adaptation on the part of the speakers, who may produce marked, non-normative forms as they negotiate meaning during cross-cultural interactions. Indeed, “the

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very extent of the use of English as a lingua franca, the fact that it has been appropriated as a global means of communication, suggests that it is not just a foreign language like any other” (Widdowson 2013, 192). Where English is considered in its lingua franca role, users “are not required to adopt the culture(s) associated with English as a native language” (Pölzl and Seidlhofer 2006, 153), as the main goal of such interactions relates to mutual intelligibility and successful communication rather than ENL-like sociolinguistic behaviour. Indeed, lingua franca use of English is said to be “de-anglicized” (Seidlhofer 2011, ix) or “deforegnized to become common property” (Widdowson 2013, 193). English, at least in its role as a language of international communication, can no longer be considered the exclusive property of its native speakers (Widdowson 1994). As English has found itself in a position to serve the communicative purposes of other speakers, processes of language variation and adaptation are inevitable (ibid., 385), and occur independently of ENL contexts and norms. Traditionally, in English Language Teaching (ELT) the native speaker is held as the ultimate model for non-native speakers (NNSs) of English, who are supposed to strive to achieve native speaker (NS) competence in the language. However, this is nearly impossible to do; this results in NNSs always falling somewhat short of the goal they are supposed to strive for. Within this framework, NNSs are always considered as somewhat deficient speakers of English, in a perpetual state of learning to attain an unachievable goal. The language they speak is not up to par with what it is required of them from an ENL mindset, and it may be defined as a “fossilized interlanguage used by learners failing to conform to the conventions of Inner Circle native norms” (Seidlhofer 2011, 24; see also J. Jenkins 2006). Deviations from ENL norms and pragmatic conventions are labelled as errors and mistakes to be fixed and eradicated (Seidlhofer 2011, x). However, non-normative uses of the language in ELF contexts should not be perceived with an ELT mindset; that is, dismissed and sanctioned as errors resulting from the speaker’s lack of competence in English. Such forms may occur for specific reasons in ELF communication as the result of meaning-negotiation strategies: “rather than typical errors or deficiencies produced by second/foreign language (permanent) learners, in ELF contexts these ‘different’ features can be seen as motivated by several functional underlying reasons as well as be part of natural language use, naturally complying with language change processes” (Vettorel 2014, see also Seidlhofer 2004, 222, 2008, 33). Strict adherence to native norms is therefore not paramount to communicative success; deviations from native speaker norms in the

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majority of cases do not hinder intercultural communication, as empirical research in ELF has widely shown (Seidlhofer 2004; Mauranen 2006a; Hülmbauer 2009; Hynninen 2010; Poppi 2012; Vettorel 2013). Indeed, the primary aim of ELF interactions is the achievement of mutual intelligibility and therefore effective communication, which is, from a communicative point of view, “more relevant than native-like correctness” (Mauranen 2005, 280). Indeed, in some cases, NNSs using ELF do not show any particular interest in reaching near-native speaker competence in English (Kankaanranta and Louhiala-Salminen 2010; Seidlhofer 2011, 39), and no desire to be affiliated with ENL cultures, “rejecting the hierarchical relationship and the identification with the NSs” (Kalocsai 2009, 35). On the other hand, their L1 identities are no longer hindrances to the achievement of the near-native target, and they are openly conveyed through the use of English as a contact language (ibid.; Seidlhofer 2011, 50). Their use of English is in many cases instrumental, whereby the language acts as a linguistic tool for the achievement of their communicative and social goals. Successful cross-cultural interactions require “constant intercultural sensitivity to a degree not normally experienced by mono- or even bilingual speakers in their native languages” (Mauranen 2005, 274), and the ability to negotiate meanings as well as social interactions online, which entails language adaptation and the use of accommodating strategies according to the characteristics of the specific communicative events. Even though ELF research focuses on meaning-making strategies, as produced by NNSs using English as a shared language of communication, ENL speakers may still be involved in such cross-cultural interactions. However, in the ELF framework, ENL speakers who wish to communicate effectively internationally may need to accommodate their language and assume cooperative linguistic behaviour in order to ensure that intelligibility is maintained. As Carey stated, “without a high level of self-awareness and desire to accommodate their interlocutors, NSs may automatically transfer the ‘territorial imperative’ to the ELF setting at the expense of mutual understanding” (2010, 92). The “territorial imperative” might be defined as a need of the speaker to signal a distinct social identity and membership within a group, and it is fulfilled through marked use of the language (Seidlhofer 2009b, 196). It coexists, in opposition, with the “cooperative imperative”, which on the other hand drives language accommodation to ensure communication (ibid.). Expecting non-native interlocutors to conform to native norms and conventions without engaging in online negotiation of meaning may result in miscomprehension and ultimately lead to communicative failure (Kalocsai 2009, 34). On the other hand, a prevalence of the territorial

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imperative over the cooperative imperative on the part of NSs in ELF interaction could also be problematic. Paradoxically, a predominance of the territorial imperative puts NSs, especially monolingual ones, at a disadvantage, as they may not have the skills to accommodate and adapt to specific communication contexts (J. Jenkins 2009b, 33; Mauranen 2012, 243). Such a focus on cooperative effort rather than linguistic accuracy in the ELF theoretical framework adds another element to the erosion of the myth of nativity (Kalocsai 2009, 26), conceiving the NNS as a fullyfledged user of English rather than an eternal learner of a foreign language striving for an idealised level of competence.

2.2.2 Deviations, innovations and strategies: function over form The rejection of the supremacy of the native speaker model goes hand in hand with the development of an alternative view in relation to the deviations from ENL norms identifiable in naturally occurring ELF data. Such deviations cannot simply be considered mere mistakes and errors to be fixed as they would in an ENL mindset (Brutt-Griffler 2002, 129). The cross-cultural nature of ELF interactions entails, as explicated in the previous section, a certain degree of accommodation and fine-tuning in order to keep the conversation flowing: with respect to English, “nonnative users do not simply adopt it, but adapt it to suit their communicative purposes: their English is not the same as that of native speakers” (Seidlhofer 2011, 64). It is therefore limiting to simply label any deviation from native norms as a mistake due to a lack of competence or inadequate acquisition of the target language (Widdowson 2012, 8; Wilton 2012, 351). As shown in ELF empirical research, there is “no evidence that that non-conformity to NS norms has any detrimental effect on communication” (Seidlhofer 2011, 39). Early research in ELF, carried out from naturally occurring data of intercultural interactions, was somewhat more “feature-based” (J. Jenkins et al. 2011, 287), attempting to identify prospective distinctive, emerging features of Lingua Franca English across contexts of use (ibid., 289). Research was then increasingly facilitated by the compilation of two specialised ELF corpora: VOICE, at the university of Vienna (Seidlhofer 2001; 2004; 2005) and ELFA (English as a Lingua Franca in Academic Settings; Mauranen 2003, 2006b, 2010; Mauranen, Hynninen, and Ranta 2010), which exist alongside smaller corpora created for individual studies. A number of lexicogrammatical features appeared in multiple unrelated contexts, and their potential as recurring, distinctive ELF features were hypothesised. One of the first lists of potential ELF features,

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reported below, led to further research, which corroborated the frequent occurrence of most items on the list. Notable examples were: x x x x x x x x

‘Dropping’ the third person present tense –s5 ‘Confusing’ the relative pronouns who and which ‘Omitting’ definite and indefinite articles where they are obligatory in ENL, and inserting them where they do not occur in ENL ‘Failing’ to use correct forms in tag questions (e.g. isn’t it? or no? instead of shouldn’t they?) Inserting ‘redundant’ prepositions, as in We have to study about...) ‘Overusing’ certain verbs of high semantic generality, such as do, have, make, put, take ‘Replacing’ infinitive-constructions with that-clauses, as in I want that ‘Overdoing explicitness (e.g. black color rather than just black) (Seidlhofer 2004, 220, emphasis in original)

However, a recent study by Mauranen, Carey, and Ranta (2015) suggests that the presence and frequencies of some of these features (lack of third person -s; interchangeability of who and which; overuse of semantic general verbs) might have been overemphasised in previous studies. By testing these elements in the part-of-speech tagged version of VOICE, it was possible to obtain more accurate data regarding language usage in relation to the features listed above. ELF data output resulting from this investigation appears to be in line with ENL language use, suggesting that the occurrence of these features in corpora may not be perceived as emerging trends in ELF. This study, in addition to challenging the development of ELF-specific tendencies, contributes to supporting the claim that denies the existence of a “set of ‘core’ ELF features, comparable to what is regarded as the core of native English” (Mauranen 2012, 274). ELF cannot be comparable to a stable, self-contained language system, but is fluid, dynamic, and adaptable according to context, which calls for a different, “distinct analytical framework” (Dewey 2009, 62). As Seidlhofer (2011, 7) puts it, ELF “is not a variety of English but a variable way of using it.” It would therefore be inappropriate to even think about ELF as a self-contained, codified variety, since its flexibility and capability to mould themselves to the here-and-now in response to varying communicative contexts and environments constitutes one of the main tenets of lingua franca use of English, which lies at the very core of the ELF framework. The deforeignised language may indeed be manipulated and adapted by its 5

See Breiteneder (2005) on the specific topic.

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speakers in order to get their message across to their interlocutors, so as to maintain mutual intelligibility and the flow of the conversation. Indeed, in recent years, the focus of ELF research has shifted from a more descriptive orientation to an increasingly functionalist view. The core issue of ELF use, therefore, is not limited to the formal aspect of language. Marked language forms, such as the features listed above, occur on a number of language levels—lexicogrammatical, phonological, and syntactic, as well as pragmatic and phraseological– and they are interpreted as the formal realisations of underlying processes that fulfil communicative and cooperative functions. Research has therefore increasingly shifted to the investigation of “how [forms] are being used by interlocutors to express their meanings and relate to each other—in other words, what these forms symbolize in terms of their underlying functions, what these forms are symptomatic of” (Seidlhofer 2009a, 40). Ultimately, what is essential in order to understand the processes regulating intercultural interactions is the identification of the “functional motivation” (ibid., 52) that such surface level forms attempt to fulfil (Hülmbauer et al. 2008). ELF users tend to develop skills that allow them to exploit all the linguistic resources at their disposal in order to function in the here-and-now of a specific interaction, adjusting their language to fit the communicative context and the linguistic abilities of the other speakers: “what we see in ELF is an entirely natural, and indeed inevitable, process of linguistic evolution, consistent with the Halliday dictum that the form a language takes is a reflection of the functions it has evolved to serve” (Widdowson 2012, 21). The functional nature of Lingua Franca English has thus become one of the basic assumptions of ELF studies, with a number of scholars recognising and reiterating the pre-eminence of function over form (Mauranen 2005, 280, 2012, 7; Seidlhofer 2011, 96; Cogo 2008, 60; Berns 2009) and gearing subsequent research towards the identification of communicative functions and strategies activated through the use of marked language choices. ELF interactions find their balance through speakers operating “according to their own ‘commonsense’ criteria,” which are negotiated online in relation to the “emically perceived communicative needs and wants in the situation they find themselves in” (Seidlhofer 2011, 50). Accommodation skills and cooperative behaviour are essential to the communicative success of ELF talk (Cogo 2009, 270, 2010): such strategies show the underlying intent of contributing to the cooperative atmosphere of the interaction, ensuring that communicative goals are met without stumbling into miscomprehension or significant communicative disruptions. They include not only fine-tuning and orienting the language to the listener, but also potentially entail an easing

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of the speaker’s own cognitive load (Mauranen 2012, 131). Repair strategies especially appear to be common in ELF (Mauranen 2006; Kaur 2011), both as a means to patch up whatever disruption might occur in the communication and as pre-emptive strategies to minimise the chance of disruptions or miscommunication in the conversation. Such cooperative behaviour, in turn, may facilitate conversation fluency. Indeed, in Seidlhofer’s words, “these processes can lead to innovation on various levels, and for various interconnected reasons, such as maximizing explicitness and thus clarity and intelligibility, exploiting redundancy and thus minimizing effort” (Seidlhofer 2011, 96). Communication and self-expression in ELF may result in marked language and unusual forms spanning across different linguistic levels: “the possibilities the language offers in principle are flexibly exploited when a communicative need arises, whether or not this results in codified and accepted words/forms” (ibid., 101).

2.2.3 Cooperation Research in ELF interaction has highlighted the widespread occurrence of non-normative language on various linguistic levels, focusing particularly on recurring features that have seemed to emerge in unrelated communicative events. Such variations from ENL norms are more noticeable on the lexical and grammatical levels, which has resulted in a wide range of studies focusing on this subject and providing observations based on authentic ELF data. Such work has shown that these unusual forms do not hamper communication, but play an active role in the communicative success of the interactions, even if their forms or functional profiles do not conform to ENL conventions. Dewey (2009), for instance, hypothesises that deviant uses of the definite article in ELF might not be casual, but a pattern of use may be identifiable stemming from an underlying process aiming at signalling and highlighting given elements in conversation. This type of strategy may be ascribable to processes of “enhanced transparency, i.e. enhanced simplicity, [which] is likely to make the processing of an utterance easier” (Hülmbauer 2009, 338). Deviant forms not accepted in ENL may also be encountered in ELF interactions as a result of morphological processes. It is not uncommon to come across instances of the regularisation of irregular verb forms, such as “teached; breaked; feeled; losed,” as well as of uncountable nouns which occur increasingly as regularised plural forms, for instance “offsprings, informations, advices, knowledges” (Mauranen 2012, 126).

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Morphological productivity has also been largely identified in ELF. Analysis of ELF interactions has shown that speakers demonstrate the ability to “extend productive derivational principles beyond their conventional boundaries,” exploiting ENL word-formation processes in order to create innovative analogic forms, such as “interpretate, introducted, and commentate” (ibid.), created via a back-formation process. While such forms at first glance do not appear to operate any language simplification, they might still play a significant role in communicative success, as such neologisms may be “comprehensible on analogical grounds, i.e., on account of being rooted in normal wordformation rules” (ibid., 131). In addition, some of these forms may add an element of redundancy that might help the listener to identify the word as belonging to a specific word class, as in increasement and linguistical, where nominalising and adjectival suffixes, namely –ment and –al, were added to base forms that were already respectively a noun and an adjective. The presence of the suffixes, however, increases clarity for the listener, in that it makes the word class of the items immediately recognisable via a process called “overt word class parking” (Hülmbauer 2007, 32). Prefixation also appears to be a common process adopted and employed in non-conventional ways by ELF speakers in order to produce specific meanings: for instance, the prefixes non- and re- were especially productive, in that they could be used to convey the idea of “reversal and repetition” (ibid., 32). In other words, the non-conventional word might be more comprehensible to the hearer than the ENL form—and easier to produce for the speaker, as it is created compositionally from separate acquired items, rather than retrieved holistically from the brain. Studies have also focused on identifying cooperative and interactional strategies that ELF speakers adopt in order to ensure conversational fluency, avoid potential disruptions, and resolve communication problems where they should arise. Cooperative behaviour has been identified in ELFA-based research, employed alongside pre-emptive efforts to adjust language to avoid risks of miscomprehension and misunderstandings (Mauranen 2006a). Such strategies include “additional confirmation checks, explanations, clarifications, and active co-construction of expressions” (Carey 2010, 90). Active co-construction, on the other hand, can be either proactive or it can occur in meaning negotiation to repair disruptions in the interaction (Mauranen 2006a, 137). Repetition and rephrasing were found to be commonly employed strategies, occurring in ELF in a variety of manifestations (Lichtkoppler 2007; Mauranen 2012). While repetition is exploited pre-eminently as a

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strategy to take extra time for planning and processing new linguistic material, it also fulfils a number of other functions: “ascertaining comprehensibility, marking discourse boundaries, showing interactive alignment and affiliation, and structuring monologue” (Mauranen 2012, 215). Investigation of ELF corpora carried out with corpus analysis tools has allowed research to be carried out on the frequency and use of discourse markers in ELF. Such studies are usually done in relation to marker behaviour in ENL, which has highlighted that multi-word units show a different distribution in ENL and ELF discourse, and their functional profiles are only partially overlapping. Baumgarten and House (2010) investigated the use of the two very common stance markers, “I think” and “I don’t know,” in ELF interactions; while they fulfil a number of ENL-attested functions, it also appeared that these markers are used in different contexts: namely, “I think” tends to be associated primarily with the expression of subjectivity (Baumgarten and House 2010, 1192–3), while “I don’t know” fulfils fewer functions in ELF than in ENL, being used “prototypically, as an expression of insufficient knowledge” and “for expressing on-line planning difficulties” (ibid., 1197). Metsä-Ketelä (2006) looked into the functional profile of the vagueness marker “more or less,” which occurred much more frequently in ELF data than in a comparable ENL corpus, and appeared to fulfil an extra function that is not found in conventional ENL discourse; that is, minimising. The expression “more or less” can be used in ELF “to indicate that the concept is either small in scale or that it is not adequate” (ibid., 135). Discourse reflexivity is another salient function of ELF (Mauranen 2007) and acts as a listener-oriented strategy, in that it increases explicitness. Metadiscourse in ELF fulfils the same functions as in ENL, but the distribution of these functions appears once again to be different in the two communicative contexts (Mauranen 2007, 9). Verbs like “talk about,” “ask,” “answer,” and “discuss,” and phrases including “question,” “answer,” etc. (Mauranen 2007, 6) can act as introductory frames of the following stretch of discourse, therefore increasing clarity and giving the listener a head start on how the communication is going to proceed. Such markers do not necessarily occur in the same form as they would in ENL discourse, since deviations may also occur, as in “put the end on it” (Mauranen 2012, 144, emphasis in original) in lieu of “put an end to it.” Non-normative forms are also found in the area of phraseology and idiomatic language, where they may fulfil multiple functions. Despite the

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strong cultural element and the potential risks of “unilateral idiomaticity6” (Seidlhofer 2009b, 201), research has shown that ELF speakers do not actually avoid using idiomatic language, even creatively. As Pitzl (2012, 39) points out: “most ELF speakers will presumably not strive for linguistic innovation, i.e. they will not generally intend to re-invent and change the language, [but] they will not shy away from doing exactly this when context, communicative need or group appropriateness prompt them to do so.” Pitzl’s work on idioms (2009; 2012) suggests that idiom use in ELF interactions is influenced by a cognitive process, which she has labelled re-metaphorization (2009, 306). In brief, the conventionalised, frozen metaphor upon which an idiom is based is re-awakened by ELF speakers, who might operate variations on the institutionalised form of the expression as they reinterpret and reprocess the underlying metaphor (ibid., 317). Entirely new metaphorical expressions, as well as translations of idioms from other languages (L1, LNs), are also created and exploited by speakers to fulfil a number of communicative functions within the interaction. These include discourse management functions, such as “summarizing, emphasizing, increasing explicitness and talking about abstract concepts” (Pitzl 2012, 47), as well as social functions, i.e. “humor and joking, mitigation of potentially facethreatening propositions, projecting stance, expressing subjectivity and establishing rapport and solidarity” (ibid.). Idiomatic language fulfils another important pragmatic function; that is, the expression of cultural identity. While ELF is primarily contentoriented, which implies a heightened attention to the communicative needs of the interaction, the territorial imperative (2.2.2) is not altogether absent in ELF communication. Despite the risk of unilateral idiomaticity and its culturally-loaded quality, idioms occur in both conventional and nonconventional forms in ELF interactions where they fulfil social functions and reinforce solidarity among speakers: “metaphors can be used to further interpersonal rapport in dealing with a tricky situation, making a sensitive proposition, bringing in your own culture, and adding humour to the interaction” (Pitzl 2009, 317). Although far from exhaustive, this section has attempted to give a brief outline of ELF research focusing on marked language choices, and highlight the existence of underlying functions explaining the motivation for non-conventional language use in ELF interaction. Unusual forms, as previously outlined, are employed within a cooperative mind frame that 6

Instance of potential miscomprehension where the listener is unable to process an unknown idiomatic expression.

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ELF speakers adopt in order to find a balance in communicative events where differences in linguacultural backgrounds, as well as competence in English, require a certain degree of flexibility and adaptation (Hülmbauer et al. 2008, 32; Pऺlzl 2003, 10). It was also seen that cooperative behaviour and communicative strategies are not solely expressed via marked language choices, but pragmatic strategies and discourse management are also used in ELF interactions, including both deviant and conventional language forms.

2.2.4 Plurilingual repertoires and code-switching ELF speakers also bring to the interaction, alongside their culture, a linguistic repertoire consisting of the L1(s) and LN(s) they may speak or be familiar with. Indeed, “ELF interactions are situations in which the average speaker is multilingual and knows that the other speakers are also multilingual, although usually … with different individual multilingual repertoires (IMRs), that is, speakers are multilingual, but not in the same languages” (Pitzl 2016, 300). Cross-linguistic influence is a significant aspect of ELF interactions that cannot be avoided due to the very nature of ELF as an international language and the multilingual competence of its speakers. In lingua franca uses of English, a variety of linguacultural backgrounds is present by default, which inevitably influences “the linguistic behavior” (Hülmbauer 2007, 24) of the speakers involved. ELF speakers can make use of their plurilingual repertoires in ELF interaction: competence in multiple languages is not to be considered a hindrance to the success of the interaction, with influences from one or more L1s and Ns “leaking” into English and leading to miscomprehension and miscommunication. On the contrary, plurilingualism and the exploitation of other linguistic resources can contribute to the success of the communicative event, fulfilling both linguistic and social functions. These aspects will be looked at in more detail in the following chapter, as they constitute the main topics of analysis in the corpus under investigation in this study. In order to familiarise the reader with the issues that will be addressed later on in relation to the specific setting of fandom and ELF fan fiction, a brief introduction here will complete the overview on ELF. In Hülmbauer’s data, it may be seen how the speakers’ plurilingual repertoires influence the linguistic forms adopted by participants in an ELF interaction. The use of the deviating words dictature instead of “dictatorship” and card in lieu of “map” were interpreted in relation to cross-linguistic influence from the participants’ L1/LNs (Spanish

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dictadura; Greek chartis; German Karte), and did not impair the communicative effectiveness of the exchange (ibid., 25–6); in actual fact, it could be said that “parallel structures of the individual L1s can be exploited to create novel mutually intelligible expressions” (ibid., 25) and that “‘false friends’ can become ‘true’ ones in ELF talk” (ibid., 27). Other examples of non-conventional words potentially facilitating comprehension can be identified in Hülmbauer’s findings (2009, 338): one of the speakers in her data produces the innovative word overfulled to express the meaning of “crowded.” In this (speaker’s) case, the production is very likely to have been influenced by the speaker’s L1—German— where the word überfüllt is used to express the same concept; however, the compositional nature of overfilled may make the deviant expression more transparent and therefore more comprehensible than “crowded,” therefore facilitating processing work for the listener (ibid., 339). Lexical innovations deriving from either word-formation processes or L1/LN transfer may serve the purpose of “fill[ing] a lexical gap in the language” (Seidlhofer 2011, 104). Speakers may exploit the resources at their disposal to create an alternative form to express the desired meaning, where an ENL option is not available among interlocutors or at all. In addition, the exploitation of plurilingual resources and the occurrence of code-switching may also play a social role within the interaction. ELF speakers have shown that language creativity of this type can also be deliberate, its occurrence not being exclusively oriented to the coconstruction of content, but to “expand on meaning and enhance speakers’ multicultural backgrounds and identities” (Cogo 2012a, 103). Plurilingual identities are an important characteristic of ELF, which, as we have seen, does not intend to assimilate NNSs of English into Anglo-American culture, but acknowledges the diversity of linguacultural backgrounds coming together in cross-cultural communication. In ELF interactions, the individual identities and plurilingual competence of the speakers thus become an integrating element in ELF talk. Plurilingual identities are embraced and asserted, and competence in multiple languages is an additional asset to be exploited in the negotiation of linguistic meaning and social relations (Seidlhofer 2011, 98). Indeed, “in ELF interactions, we can see speakers utilizing the whole spectrum of Englishization on the one hand and expressing their own identity through use of expressions in their L1, often within one short part of a conversation” (ibid., 116). Switching into another language—either the speakers’ L1 or an LN— is indeed not uncommon, and is generally a strategy that fulfils both linguistic and socio-cultural functions in the interaction. Klimpfinger (2007, 38), for example, has identified four main functions of code-

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switching in her analysis of the VOICE corpus that cover both the linguistic and social spectrum, that is: “specifying an addressee; appealing for assistance; introducing another idea; signalling culture.” Klimpfinger sees code-switching as a way for speakers to personalise their language of communication, using it “as a means of expressing one’s bilingual identity” (ibid., 41; see also Cogo 2011) as well as expressing proximity to specific interlocutors, for instance, when it is exploited to specify an addressee. Uses of the L1 and other languages known by the speakers might not have an exclusively linguistic function, but they might occur in interactions in order to signal the speaker’s own culture or to express social proximity and solidarity to one or more participants in the conversation (Klimpfinger 2007). Code-switching assumes here a primarily pragmatic role, as the motivations behind the use of the L1 or LN in an exchange usually have, as it was previously said, a socio-cultural meaning along with the linguistic one. Indeed, when speakers switch to signal cultural elements, the element may occur either in the L1 or in an LN: in the second case, the switch may be aimed at signalling the speaker’s proximity with the culture underlying the LN employed, as well as expressing “a wish to reduce social distance,” the acknowledgement of the “interlocutor’s cultural background” (ibid., 56). Indeed, switched items introduced in the conversation by an L1 speaker may “also be temporarily adopted or borrowed as LN expressions by other ELF users involved” (Pölzl 2003, 11), especially in cases where the geographical location of an interaction leads to a heightened awareness of a given background language. The same functions have been recently highlighted by Cogo in business contexts: her analysis of speaker perceptions on accommodation and multilingualism in BELF (English as Business Lingua Franca) suggests that that “practices of language mixing are used effectively for professional work and construction of professional identity” (Cogo 2016, 379). Other languages may be employed to underline belonging, not only to the speaker’s own culture, but to a company, as well as to build rapport and show solidarity to other employees (ibid.; see also Louhiala-Salminen, Charles, and Kankaanranta 2005).

2.3 (Written) ELF and CMC Most of the strategies listed here emerged from research on spoken data; indeed, research in the field of ELF has been carried out almost exclusively on spoken data for many years. Reasons for this tendency relate to the more spontaneous and unconstrained nature of spoken language, which provides researchers with authentic, unedited data as well

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as the dialogic, interactional quality of speech, since it may shed light on how speakers negotiate meaning online (Seidlhofer 2004: 215). Writing is generally more conservative in language terms, as it does not require immediate processing; furthermore, the writer may have the chance to edit and review the text multiple times before releasing it, which might result in the “correction” of non-normative lexicogrammatical, syntactic, and phraseological features that have been noted to appear in speech or unedited texts. In addition, in genres such as academic writing, texts written by NNSs are often proofread by NSs before publication, which generally entails edits made to “conform to native speaker conventions of use” (Seidlhofer 2004, 223). However, as of late, it appears that research has opened up to include written aspects of ELF. The source for written data has fallen, not casually, on the internet, specifically on online discourse, or CMC of various types (Mauranen 2013; Poppi 2012; Vettorel 2012, 2014). CMC, even in its most monologic realisations, is interesting from an ELF point of view, because in the protean space of the world wide web it is common to find spontaneous, unedited, and unmediated written language produced by NNSs, who use ELF to interact and share content with a diverse international audience. In such cases, texts have not been subjected to multiple edits and proofreadings by native speakers, who might not only “fix” deviations and idiosyncrasies on the lexicogrammatical and phraseological levels, but also orient the text towards ENL rhetoric and discursive style. As a result of their lack of editing and “corrections,” such texts can be described as fully representative of ELF written discourse. Research on written ELF mainly focuses on online data, as will be seen in the brief overview below. The WrELFA corpus (Written English as a Lingua Franca in Academic Contexts), compiled at the University of Helsinki, consists of 1.5 million words and including three different text types: unedited research papers, PhD examiner reports, and research blogs.7 The last category represents natural online data, which entails a certain degree of spontaneity and immediacy in both the main posts and the discussion starting from them in the comments section.8 Poppi’s (2012) investigation of BELF included both dialogically-oriented (e-mail exchange) and monologically-oriented CMC, that is, corporate websites (Poppi 2012, 164), and especially the “About Us” sections of such websites, of which she provides an in-depth linguistic analysis that illustrates “how language is adapted and modified 7

http://www.helsinki.fi/englanti/elfa/wrelfa.html Accessed July 20, 2016; see also Carey (2013a, 2013c, 2013d). 8 http://www.helsinki.fi/englanti/elfa/blogs.html Accessed July 20, 2016

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by seven European companies, for the purpose of maintaining and foregrounding their socio-cultural identity” (ibid., 166). Vettorel’s research on blogs (2012, 2014), on the other hand, shifts the focus of online research to ELF interaction for leisure purposes, analysing lexical innovations as well as lexicogrammar and morpho-syntactic ELF features, and the exploitation of plurilingual resources in blog posts and comments written by NNSs of English participating in an international network of bloggers on the Live Journal platform (LJ). Weblogs were deemed an appropriate source of data as “they represent ‘real’ settings of language use, their social and community-oriented characteristics support[ing] potential interaction” (Vettorel 2012, 68). The three online corpora illustrated above represent only a limited section of the hybrid, multi-faceted nature of CMC. Internet discourse has mushroomed in the past 20 years as a result of easier access to home computers and the internet, and a range of discourse genres—as CMC is too diversified to be considered a single genre—have developed in response to the multitude of textual and multimodal means of communication at the computer user’s disposal: “what may be referred to as Netspeak features are not employed in all types of CMC and all contexts of use” (Barton and Lee 2013, 5). Early studies on CMC had the tendency to compare online discourse to either traditional written and oral language in an attempt to frame the newly emerging discourse within the orthodox dichotomy (ibid.); however, the many realisations of CMC cannot be reduced to either one or the other. Neither can it be dismissed as a hybrid mode, located on the written/speech cline, according to the communicative context and related technological platform: online discourse is characterised by both written and spoken features. However, a set of features distinctive from CMC have also emerged due to the peculiarity of the tools making digital interaction possible. In more interactional contexts, a number of ways have emerged to compensate for the lack of extra-linguistic cues in a type of communication that was, at least in its early days, exclusively textual (Crystal 2001; Al-Sa’Di and Hamdan 2005; Baym 2010). In addition to the now classic emoticons— punctuation marks combined to give shape to a stylised human face expressing various moods and states of being—orthographic conventions have been established in order to express emphasis, such as “asterisks as brackets, upper-case lettering and letter and punctuation repetition” (Baym 2010, 60). Acronyms such as LOL (“laughing out loud”) and abbreviations (ibid., 61), especially in synchronous modes or ones that allow users a limited amount of characters are in widespread use.

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The “systems or resources that people draw upon for meaning making” online (Barton and Lee 2013, 29) are also defined as modes. Many internet users engage habitually in multiple modes during their online activities, for both professional and leisure purposes; in our case, the practices associated with fandom span multiple modes of digital communications: fan talk occurs through e-mail, on discussion forums, in chatrooms, and on blogs. Fan fiction was seen to involve a specific set of related practices and language. Each of these modes has its own “idioms of practice” (Gershon 2010); that is, a set of distinctive linguistic and non-linguistic features, characterising specific modes of interaction that users acquire over time in order to function efficiently within given communicative contexts. Such shared features, linking together users involved in the same practices and participating in the same contexts, may act as signs of the existence of a community (Barton and Lee 2013, 25). Fans, who either participate actively in the creation of fan texts or partake passively of the multimodal products of fandom, assimilate the ways of the practices and communicative modes they engage with, which allows them to function effectively in a variety of contexts and situations, and be considered as part of groups. In addition to learning the idioms of practice of their communities, internet users who are NNSs of English have to negotiate in a multitude of digital environments and contexts in this language, when they choose to do so, in order to gain access to a wider range of content and people, as we will see in the next section.

2.4 Language Choice Online Internet users are perfectly aware of the additional information and exposure using English online may give them, as ethnographic elements in online discourse investigations appear to show (e.g Leppनnen et al. 2009; Barton and Lee 2013; Black 2008). Even in CMC modes that are more multimodally-oriented than fan talk and fan fiction, which are preeminently textual, the presence of English alone may attract more attention to the media portrayed, and as a result foster the creation and development of wider international networks. This would be the case for fans engaging in icon making, or amateur artists and photographers sharing their works on dedicated sites such as deviantART9 or Flickr,10 as suggested in Barton and Lee’s study on multilingual practices and language choice on Flickr (2013). User interviews showed that they “agreed that English is the 9

www.deviantart.com/ Accessed July 20, 2016. http://www.flickr.com/ Accessed July 20, 2016.

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‘universal’ language, which they would use to communicate with people who do not speak their local languages” (Barton and Lee 2013, 56), with one specific informant claiming that her local language was simply not in the global context of the internet enough (ibid., 82). While she would put in the effort to use English to interact with a wider audience, she would not stop using her L1 altogether (ibid.), which suggests that, as was also detected for ELF users in face-to-face contexts, “people want to be part of the global world without giving up their existing identities” (ibid., 83; see also Vettorel 2014). Leppनnen et al.’s Finnish informants, four teenagers engaging in online social practices, similarly showed “awareness of the social value associated with English: it is seen as a gateway to international communities and to a cosmopolitan future” (2009, 1086). Indeed, one of her subjects, a fan fiction writer, put forward that “writing in English is of course sometimes motivated by a wish to reach bigger audiences than the local Finnish ones” (ibid., 1090). Personal correspondence with some of the fan fiction authors who provided the data for the corpus taken into consideration here also appears to confirm the will to share their work with a wider audience as the main motivation for writing in English. Sometimes a local fandom does not exist for the media of choice, or it is too small and limited in terms of content production and readership. However, not all fan fiction writers switch permanently to English; often, they alternate between writing stories in English and in their L1—or an LN—or translating stories written in the L1 into English. Leppänen’s informant, who writes for manga and anime fandom, also includes Japanese elements in her stories, like many other non-Japanese writers in this area of fandom.

2.4.1 Translocality and globalisation Plurilingual practices in fan fiction writing will be the main focus of chapters four and five, but it is important to introduce the concept of multilingualism and language choice on the internet as a sign of the coexistence, within CMC, of the concepts of territoriality and deterritoriality (Hepp 2009): “global cultural products and practices are mobilized in situated action” (Leppनnen et al. 2009, 1081). The uses of English and of the new media illustrated above may be ascribed to a translocal view of new media (Hepp 2009; Leppनnen et al. 2009) where the situatedness of new media practices may transcend its boundaries into a de-territorialised global context, such as in the examples seen above. Translocality “denotes a specific understanding of culture, where culture is

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seen as outward-looking, exogenous, focused on hybridity, translation, and identification” (Leppनnen 2009, 1082). The coexistence of the local and the translocal, especially when the latter indicates the global, is not limited to language use in CMC and the new media; it is one of the main results of the underlying processes of globalisation that have also fostered the increasing use of English outside ENL and ESL contexts, where it took on its Lingua Franca role, as well as the creation of virtual communities online. Globalisation has changed the way humans relate to many aspects of their lives, expanding them from pre-eminently geographically based experiences to mobile, deterritorialised practices that are no longer conceivable within traditional paradigms. Globalisation has called for the redefinition of a number of traditional concepts whose theoretical assumptions were no longer suitable to fully address new, emerging global phenomena. The NS/NNS dichotomy in ELF, the written/speech one in CMC, and the traditional, geographically based concept of community have been challenged in recent times in order to fit new realities and contexts characterised by contingency, variation, fragmentation, hybridity, and fluidity: “established notions such as ‘language,’ ‘culture’ or ‘place’ are not useful in analysis of objects that are necessarily mixed, hybrid, local as well as delocalized (or delocalizable), dynamic and unstable” (Blommaert 2010, 18).

2.5 Fragmented Realities The qualities cited above can be easily associated with postmodernism; Seidlhofer states that “there are many aspects that can be said to characterize [ELF] as a postmodern phenomenon: it can be described as a hybrid, fragmented, contingent, marginal, indeterminate use of language” (Seidlhofer 2011, 73). Indeed, ELF, CMC, and fandom as a community can all be conceived within a postmodernist perspective. Fan fiction writing can also be seen as a postmodern phenomenon.

2.5.1 ELF and postmodernism Due to its core characteristics, English as a Lingua Franca can be conceived within a postmodernist perspective: the emergence of ELF can be seen as the result of the same globalisation processes that have led to the dismantling of the modernist paradigm and the emergence of postmodernist theory. As Blommaert states, “globalization forces sociolinguistics to unthink its classic distinctions and biases and to rethink

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itself as a sociolinguistics of mobile resources, framed in terms of transcontextual networks, flows and movements” (Blommaert 2010, 1). Since the very beginning of academic research on ELF, before it configured itself as a distinct field of research—that is, ELF studies— scholars addressing ELF have highlighted the need to challenge traditional tenets, such as the NS/NNS dichotomy and the concept of Standard English. The typically postmodern process, by which well-defined concepts and dichotomies are questioned and challenged, could be defined through the German concept of Entdifferenzierung (Lash 1990, 202); that is, dedifferentiation of traditional notions and ideas. The notions of dedifferentiation and delegitimation may be adopted to define the changes in “politics, economics, and social life” (Connor 2004, 3) that have led to the switch from modernist to postmodernist theory: “authority and legitimacy were no longer so powerfully concentrated in the centers they had previously occupied” (ibid., 3). By rejecting the myth of the native speaker (Rajagopalan 1997), ELF studies erode the authority of native speakers as ideal speakers of the language and their role as “gatekeepers” to the English-speaking community. In addition, by recognising a deterritorialisation of the language in cross-cultural contexts of use, ELF scholars challenge the authority of the native speaker as the only legitimate owner of the English language (Widdowson 1994). The process of Entidifferenzierung is noticeable in the way ELF attempts to overcome the NS/NNS dichotomy by emphasising the importance of communicative effectiveness and cross-cultural awareness in international interactions, regardless of the speaker’s L1, rather than an allegedly innate competence in the language associated exclusively with ENL speakers. In the orthodox ELT view, everything that does not conform to ENL norms is automatically perceived as a sign of the speaker’s lack of competence in the language and put in the error category (Seidlhofer 2011 x). In the postmodern fields of World Englishes and ELF, the dichotomy is broken—dedifferentiated—in order to give room to a much more comprehensive view that accounts for language change and evolution in English, and to account for nativised varieties of English. The postmodernist perspective acknowledges the erosion, or complication, of traditional differentiations, among which are those between “centres” and “margins” (Connor 2004, 3). The “centre” and “margin” or “periphery” perspective is also applicable to linguistics, as in the case of English, where ENL countries are located at the “centre” and ESL countries and countries where English is spoken only as a foreign language are located at the “margins.” The recent acknowledgement of established varieties of English, the New Englishes, as legitimate varieties of English is easily

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ascribable to this perspective and is consistent with the notion of delegitimation illustrated by Connor. ELF similarly challenges the hierarchical relation between centre and periphery, as deterritorialisation of the language and a heightened emphasis on communicative effectiveness erode the supremacy of the centre, in this case identifiable with the United Kingdom and, to a lesser degree, the United States. James goes to the extent of defining international uses of English as post-geographic (2008, 99), in that they cannot be categorised according to traditional sociolinguistic modes, which are in turn associated with geographicallydefined, self-containing speech communities (ibid.). According to him, Lingua Franca uses of English “have not developed over time in stable and continuous sociopolitical entities, but have been and still are, used largely ad hoc in situations of immediate communication (face to face, cell phone to cell phone, computer to computer) and constitute in the first place individual and not societal varieties” (ibid., 100). ELF can be ascribed to what Blommaert has called the “sociolinguistics of mobility,” a paradigm that focuses not on “language-in-place but on language-in-motion” (2010, 5), that is, “a sociolinguistics of ‘speech’, of actual language resources deployed in real sociocultural, historical and political contexts” (ibid.). ELF appears to fit the bill, as English is shaped online according to the uniqueness of each of the communicative needs of the speakers and the interaction (Pennycook 2012; Blommaert and Backus 2013). ELF’s protean ability to accommodate to different contexts, as well as it not being recognisable as a stable variety of English, may be reminiscent of the rhizome paradigm proposed by Deleuze and Guattari (1987), which is aimed at providing an alternative vision to the arborescent view of knowledge. The latter is based on a binary type of classification of knowledge, easily relatable to the dichotomies that ELF studies are trying to dismantle.11 The structure of the rhizome, on the other hand, is not linear; it may “assume diverse forms, from ramified surface extension in all directions to concretion into bulbs and tubers” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 7) with no hierarchical connection to a superior One, identifiable here with the ideal ENL Standard. The existence of many parallel uses of English, each of them different as the language adapts to its circumstances and the goals it needs to fulfil, emerging as the need arises, may be consistent with a rhizomatic view. Its ever-changing nature is consistent with the principles of cartography and decalcomania that define the 11

A parallel between ELF and the rhizome model was also drawn by Cornelia Hülmbauer: "Language without languages: a post-structuralist approach to and from ELF,” presentation at the ELF6. Sixth conference of English as a Lingua Franca, University of Roma 3. Rome, Italy, September 4–7 (2013b).

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rhizome, which is describable as a map, “open and connectable in all of its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification. It can be torn, reversed, adapted to any kind of mounting, reworked by an individual, group, or social formation” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 12). The map is related to contingency and performance, whereas decalcomania, or tracing, links back to “an alleged ‘competence’” (ibid., 13). Such a distinction underlines the contingent nature of ELF, which is modelled and shaped according to the immediate needs of the situation. However, ELF also participates in the contradictions of globalisation: on the one hand, it is a unifying process “in that people throughout the world increasingly share common experience” (Chouliaraki and Fairclough 1999, 81), while on the other it fosters multiplicity and variation, “offering new resources for differentiation and fragmentation of subjectivity” (ibid., 82). In linguistic terms, centripetal and centrifugal forces appear to be at work at the same time, fostering both homogenisation and a high degree of variation and fragmentation at the same time (McArthur 1994, 233). Lingua Franca uses of English per se perform a unifying role, as they allow international communication to occur to an unprecedented extent, contributing to a flow of information that runs globally and unmediated. At the same time, however, the everchanging conditions and contexts of ELF interactions foster differentiation and variation, as language is continuously adapted and fine-tuned to any given situation. Cogo, in relation to ELF, adopts the notion of superdiversity (Vertovec 2007), definable as the “intensifying of diversity, which emerged out of new patterns of communication and mobility in global and urban contexts” (Cogo 2012b, 288). Super-diversity, which refers to both linguistic and sociocultural aspects, is a characteristic of ELF communication entailing the simultaneous presence of multiple linguacultural backgrounds and sociolinguistic repertoires in the same communicative context. This fosters the hybridity of ELF talk, mentioned by Seidlhofer (2011, 73), which constitutes yet another aspect of ELF that allows us to describe it in postmodernist terms (Chouliaraki and Fairclough 1999, 13). The hybridity of ELF was partly illustrated in the previous sections in terms of communicative strategies, inventiveness, and plurilingual practices, which constitute an accommodative exploitation of the speaker’s sociocultural resources and illustrate how ELF cannot be seen as a stable, self-defined linguistic system. It is a shape-shifter, including and making use of linguistic and sociocultural elements which become embedded in a deterritorialised English in order to ensure successful intercultural

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communication. Postmodernism is similarly inherent in ELF speakers themselves who, as they operate in postmodern contexts, show a certain degree of hybridity and fragmentation of the subjectivity in their use of language, as was seen in a variety of examples illustrated so far (Pitzl, Breiteneder, and Klimpfinger 2008; Hülmbauer 2007, 2009; Pitzl 2009, 2012; Seidlhofer 2011; Mauranen 2012). ELF users such as Barton and Lee’s Flickr’s poster (2013, 82) and Leppनnen et al.’s Finnish fan fiction writer (2009, 1090) draw from all their sociolinguistic and sociocultural resources as they communicate online, projecting different identities that shift according to the context of interaction. In order to better illustrate the concept of ELF speaker resourcefulness, Cogo adopts Blommaert’s definition of sociocultural repertoire, which “is tied to an individual’s life and it follows the peculiar biographical trajectory of the speaker” (Blommaert 2008, 16). That is, it is formed layer upon layer through a speaker’s life as a result of communicative experiences in various contexts of use. This notion is easily adaptable to the ELF approach, as ELF speakers exploit their repertoire in an accommodative and a convergent manner in order to maintain intelligibility in ELF interactions. Thus, “variation is at the heart of ELF communication and strictly dependent on the multilingual repertoires and practices of the ELF community of users” (Cogo 2012b, 291). To summarise, the ELF perspective has shifted from the traditional modernist views of language into a postmodernist framework in trying to understand and describe this phenomenon, as it provides a “focus on language as co-constructed and emergent from dynamic processes and practices; a separation of language from traditional associations with nation-states, or a particular ‘culture’ and ‘identity’; a view of speech community as formed in practice with a developed-in-common sociocultural repertoire” (ibid., 292). As the result of globalisation processes, ELF is closely intertwined to other phenomena emerging and shaped by such processes, such as the collapse of the spatial dimension fostering international and long-distance communications, which have problematised a number of previously undiscussed tenets such as that of speech community and community itself, since groups of people started to come together and form strong social bonds outside traditional geographical boundaries. The redefinition of the spatial dimension was further complicated by the development of internet technology, which eliminated the need for simultaneous presence in the same place or time of the participants to a given interaction. The ELF speakers engaging in fandom practices can easily be said to be plunged into a double postmodernist environment when they interact online. Hybridity and

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contingency are also widely debated characteristics of CMC, of which online fandom is a very popular example.

2.5.2 Online fandom and postmodernism Online fandom can be seen within a postmodernist framework by virtue of its relation to CMC, but also because of the pop cultural nature of its object of interest and related practices. One of the characteristics of postmodernism consists in the breaking down of the barrier between high culture and low culture (Lash 1990, 202; Connor 2004, 3): as illustrated in chapter one (1.2.1), contemporary fandom as a pre-eminently pop culture phenomenon fits perfectly with this description. The gap between high and low culture seems to have reduced, with increasing importance being placed on entertainment products such as blockbuster movies, contemporary novels, TV shows, and Japanese animation. A blend of social and cultural elements is also listed in Lash’s work as a characteristic of postmodernism (1990, 203), which is similarly applicable to fandom when the importance of its social dimension is taken into account. Pop culture products, such as those listed above, are generally created with the individual spectator in mind: fandom strengthens the social dimension of a certain type of entertainment through participation in face-to-face and online communicative and productive practices. The immersion of the audience in the source text, the interest and the investment in the cultural object, which is at the very core of the definition of fandom, is also ascribable to a postmodernist point of view in what Lash calls a “figural” way of signifying culture; this is in opposition to the “discursive” mode that was typical of modernism (ibid., 205). The latter included a tendency towards formalism and emphasis on the distance between audience and the cultural object, which indeed clashes with the active engagement and remixing practices that characterise the way fans relate to texts of their choice. These postmodernist qualities are inherent to fandom, dating back to its preinternet days and merging online fandom with the equally postmodern character of CMC. Indeed, fandom, with its wide range of social and productive practices, spans a number of CMC modes and is constituted by a network of fan communities, which in turn interact through multiple CMC modes. The emergence of both virtual communities and of CMC modes is a result of a process that led to the collapsing of the spatial dimension. The consequences of this process include, probably as its most recent and emblematic example, the possibilities provided by the development of computer and internet technology.

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While it is well beyond the scope of our research, it should also be mentioned that remixing practices, such as fan fiction writing, also have postmodern characteristics from a literary point of view, as they may be conceived within the rewriting perspective that characterises postmodern narrative (Moraru 2001).

2.5.3 Fandom and CMC in postmodernism: spatiality and identity Since its beginnings in the early twentieth century, fandom has been shaped and restructured; as a consequence, social and productive practices have been equally affected by the processes of globalisation that have changed the way humans interact and aggregate in a substantial manner. The internet is probably only the latest step in “a process of ‘annihilation of space through time’—as the speed and cost of travel, transportation, and the communication of information and images have been dramatically reduced, spatial barriers have collapsed” (Chouliaraki and Fairclough 1999, 77). Along with IT (information technologies) and internet development, new and virtual environments were created through the use of technology where “an abundance of information sources, commercial opportunities, and places for social encounter awaited the user” (Connor 2004, 140). These new spaces effectively collapsed the modernist association of technology with machines (ibid.) as it became a direct tool for social interaction thanks to the global network it permitted to create and sustain. CMC is also describable within a perspective of dedifferentiation, since it dismantles the binary distinction between written and spoken language, to which no CMC mode can be completely ascribed: “any instance of digital language use depends on the technology, the purpose of the interaction, the norms of the group, the communication style of the speakers’ social groups offline, and the idiosyncrasies of individuals” (Baym 2010, 65). While most of the elements mentioned by Baym are applicable to all uses of language, technology is distinctive of CMC, as language practices online may vary dramatically according to the type of platform or software mediating communication. For this reason, CMC also displays rhizomatic characteristics. CMC fits in the description of the rhizome as characterised by “connection and heterogeneity” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 7). CMC is realised in a number of different ways, depending on the mode of communication and the affordances of the technological tools allowing the interaction to take place. CMC modes are multiple and heterogeneous, overlapping in certain aspects and differing in

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many others, and yet not categorisable as stemming from a hierarchically superior “One” (ibid., 8). In addition, “a rhizome may be broken, shattered at a given spot, but it will start up again on one of its old lines, or on new lines (ibid., 9). A specific mode of CMC may come to its end for various reasons, but developments in technology may introduce new, different modes, which are connected to other existing modes without stemming from them or being in any way genealogically linked to them. The same holds where online fandom is concerned: the social and productive practices associated with fandom are, as illustrated in chapter one, heterogeneous, interconnected, and yet unconceivable as a unit. It is therefore consistent with the principle of multiplicity (ibid., 8), as well as with that of cartography, due to its ever-changing nature: “a map has multiple entryways, as opposed to the tracing, which always comes back ‘to the same’” (ibid., 12). At the same time, CMC modes have problematised a number of other modernist, traditional tenets that became unsuitable to describe and illustrate new modes and dynamics resulting from the annihilation of space. Increased mobility and migration fluxes, alongside removal from physical space in internet communication, similarly affect humans and the way in which they shape and project their identities. Postmodern identities are super-diverse, resulting in a multi-layered sociocultural repertoire deriving from the individual’s experiences in hyper-mobile, globalised contexts, which is then reshaped and projected according to any given context of interaction. CMC is widely considered one of the environments where identity appears to be most fluid; due to the lack of physical presence, and, as a result, social cues, it is possible for users to project a different persona than in real life, to the point where internet users may be deliberately lying about aspects of themselves, or even pose as women or children. The screen of anonymity provided by the internet may foster this kind of deception, but, as Baym puts forward, it is suggested that users engaging in social communication online tend to be more honest when interacting with others: “the anonymity of online interactions makes some people more willing to disclose and foster new relationship formation” (Baym 2010, 102). It has indeed been recognised that virtual communities support the creation of superficial as well as deeper social bonds, regardless of whether the members of a given online group also establish parallel offline relationships. At the same time, virtual environments allow users to highlight certain aspects of their identity rather than others, in relation to the social contexts or practices they participate in. In Rimskii’s words, “on the Internet, such a situation affords substantially more freedom when it

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comes to the creation and use of identities than does the real world” (2010, 19). As a result, CMC tends to contribute to the postmodern fragmentation of human identity, which is no longer definable exclusively in terms of concepts such as nation states (Anderson 1991; Blommaert 2010) and speech communities, as the human experience is now removed from specific geographical locations and self-containing systems; on the contrary, it has become fluid, heterogeneous, and super-diverse (Blommaert 2010; Pennycook 2012; Blommaert and Backus 2013). In a globalised society, the global and the local are engaged in continuous interplay: “the process of constructing self-identity in the contemporary world is profoundly penetrated by global processes and tendencies, which individuals have to position themselves in relation to” (Chouliaraki and Fairclough 1999, 81; see also Giddens 1991). Due to the extreme diversity and contingency of both ELF and CMC communication, and, within the latter, of fandom, speakers and/or internet users find themselves adapting not only their sociolinguistic cues to the idioms of practice of a particular interaction—when these are identifiable, as in CMC—but also their identities, as they may highlight one or more aspects according to the context they find themselves in. Chouliaraki and Fairclough talk about “post conventional identities”; that is, “people who are not positioned within traditions but able to creatively remake themselves through creative reworking of inherited social resources” (1999, 84). In the online context, users may also “[internalize] elements that they acquire from the Internet” (Rimskii 2010, 26), which in turn contribute to the creation of a sociocultural repertoire that is then exploited in order to function effectively in ever-changing online environments (Blommaert 2010, 2013). As Rimskii states, due to the nature of internet communication, the construction of identity online depends on a set of context-bound features that fosters the parallel existence, for a single user, of multiple virtual identities: “the leading role in the formation of an identity on the Internet is evidently played by verbal, literary, and textual constructs” (Rimskii 2010, 27). In addition, in more recent CMC modes such as blogging, microblogging, and platforms like Facebook and Twitter, the prevalent textuality of online discourse exists alongside other, multimodal means of expressing one’s self: images, music, and animation contribute to constructing one or more online identities, to the point where communication through images sometimes substitutes verbal cues entirely. Even in fandom—which is only one of the many bulbs of the internet rhizome, and in turn simultaneously linked to many other bulbs through non-linear connections—the phenomenon of fragmented identities is easily noticeable. Individual communities may focus on a specific aspect

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of a specific fandom: on a message board dedicated to a romantic relationship between two characters in a science-fiction TV show, the primary identity projected by a given user will be that of “shipper,12” whereas this “shipper” side may not even emerge at all on the same user’s Facebook profile. In contrast, other participants on the shipper message board may never learn that their fellow fan is, say, a martial arts practitioner, or an avid reader of Victorian novels. Such aspects of the user’s identity may only be projected on the message board in case they contribute to the main line of discourse; that is, the chosen “ship”: a comparison may be drawn between the characters in a Victorian novel and those in the TV show, or the user may offer martial arts tips to a fan fiction writer who wants to add a fighting scene in a story focusing on the characters they ship. Our hypothetical fan may, as a result, be considered a resident martial arts expert on the message board, with posters asking advice on the matter for fan fiction writing, or when discussing episodes. To keep the example within fandom, the same user, in addition to being a shipper in the science-fiction TV show fandom, may also create fan art for another TV show, and share it on a deviantART page with other fans who may not know of the user’s engagement with the shipper board, unless the user decides to mention that in their deviantART page. The user may also decide to use different usernames according to fandom, so that the two personas may not be easily associated with one another or tracked back to a single individual. In this sense, fandom is again ascribable to the notion of cartography; that is, a characteristic of the rhizome as described above. The fandom, like Deleuze and Guattari’s map, can be accessed from multiple entryways—the shipper board or the deviantART page in our example— and, as has already been said, it is open and unrestricted in its ability to connect from all its dimensions. “It fosters connections between fields” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 12), which, as was seen in chapter one, is one of the most noticeable characteristics of fandom in the variety of chosen texts and the practices fans engage in. Fandom as CMC is also inherently hybrid, as communication among fans occurs across CMC modes: fans may participate simultaneously in interactions in different types of virtual environments; fans may write on message boards, update their blogs, Facebook, and Twitter profiles, publish fan fiction and fan art, leave comments for other fans, or enter a dedicated chatroom with relative ease. They function as active and 12

“Shipping” describes the practice of supporting a romantic relationship between two characters in TV shows, movies, books, and comic books (http://fanlore.org/wiki/Shipping) Accessed July 20, 2016.

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accepted members of these groups by displaying to other users the necessary knowledge of the affordances, as well as skills in the idioms of practice of each single mode they engage in to communicate with other fans. The super-diversity of fandom as a whole has to be matched with super-diverse sociocultural repertoires on the part of fans, if they aim to be accepted as fellow fans and effective members of their chosen communities. Despite the complexity and extreme diversity of the online contexts involved in fandom, fan communities thrive as intercultural groups communicating through the use of English as a Lingua Franca: “despite the different social, ethnic and linguistic backgrounds these individuals and groups may have, they have found on the Internet a place in which they can come together with other like-minded people to share their interests, concerns or causes” (Leppनnen and Peuronen 2012, 389).

2.6 Fandom and ELF: Postmodern Communities In the end, it might be said that ELF, CMC, and online fandom can all be conceived of and described as postmodern phenomena. They fit with a number of assumptions characterising postmodernist theory and, due to their inherent qualities, cannot be envisaged within the traditional, modernist paradigm. The hybridity and fragmentation of both ELF and CMC and their adaptability to contingent situations developed as a result of globalisation processes that weakened geographical boundaries and fostered mobility and communication at an international level, changing the nature and modes of interaction among humans. These globalisation processes involve the separation of time and space and their recombination in new, diverse forms, in turn functioning within an entirely different spatial-temporal frame: “this intensification of time-space distantiation involves the ‘disembedding’ of social relations from particular places and contexts, and their generalization across temporal and spatial boundaries” (Chouliaraki and Fairclough 1999, 80). Social relations are no longer limited by geographical boundaries; local face-to-face interactions exist alongside long-distance relations of an increasingly international, crosscultural nature. Social relations become disembedded from a physical locus: they are no longer defined by geographical proximity, or by national or religious identity. On the contrary, interactions may occur among groups of people that are linked by their profession or by a specific interest, unconstrained by geographical boundaries as traditionally conceived. Groups do not need participants to be physically present together in a given space at a given time in order for it to exist or the interaction to occur. The global contexts where ELF and CMC thrive,

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allowing the existence of worldwide groups and organisations to exist, did not develop overnight. They were the consequence of a slow but steady process that started to challenge and problematise the notion of community as originally conceived, initially in a social and later in a linguistic sense. As a very socially oriented set of practices, online fandom is, alongside ELF, an epitome of globalisation, in that fandom exists outside geographical and sociocultural boundaries that have now become permeable to increased mobility and migration—and information—fluxes (Pennycook 2012; Blommaert and Backus 2013). As a result, the traditional notion of community as homogenous, self-contained, and geographically bound has been problematised in light of the globalisation processes underway. “The whole modernist project of structural linguistics is predicated on the assumption that languages (and their NSs) pertain to clearly circumscribable speech communities” (James 2008, 99). This assumption, however, does not hold anymore, in light of the socio-economic changes that have challenged such self-containing systems as a consequence of increased mobility in the physical world and the annihilation of the spatial dimension in virtual environments. The reality of plurilingualism has long been acknowledged; however, Mauranen puts forward that traditional models of speech communities have downplayed, if not downright ignored, this fundamental aspect in the theorisation and subsequent empirical studies in the field of sociolinguistics (2012, 22). Globalisation, more recently, has strongly brought this aspect to the fore, as “the borders of linguistically defined communities have become more porous” (James 2008, 109), and the degree of plurilingualism in many geographically or non-geographically defined realities is such that it cannot be ignored any longer. Similarly, the notion of speech community as traditionally intended is no longer tenable to describe and explain contemporary uses of languages and especially English, which has been deterritorialised and adopted as the working language in geographicallyunbound, cross-cultural communicative contexts. “An ELF community looks potentially enormous, even amorphous. There is no single identifiable ELF community, although nearly the whole world uses ELF to a notable degree in their communicative activities” (Mauranen 2012, 18). Mauranen compares ELF speakers to an imagined community (Anderson 1991), in that its members cannot possibly interact face-to-face with all other members of the imagined community. Such communities are rather constructed upon a mental image of affinity shared by its members. These mental images are constantly fed by communication among members, who thus maintain their identification with the community. In order to foster such images, however, communication

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among members has to be efficient and effective, which entails a certain degree of knowledge on the members’ part of the chosen language of communication, so that intelligibility may be maintained (ibid.; Mauranen 2012, 18). The notion of imagined communities may fit both ELF and fandom as a whole, as the sheer number of people engaging in either, in their endless possibilities for realisation, makes it impossible to even conceive for them a notion of community where communication may be direct; that is, faceto-face for all members. Fandom, like ELF, may be described with the same adjective used by Mauranen: “amorphous” (ibid.). The number of potential texts upon which fandom might be based, combined with the related practices fans engage in, results in a system that is way too big and diverse to be circumscribed and defined as a whole: fans, however, as was seen in chapter one (1.3), display a strong sense of belonging and therefore membership to fandom. Even though a fan cannot possibly be directly connected to all other fans, even within a relatively limited interactive environment such as a message board the mental image of affinity to the group exists and remains alive in the fan’s mind. There is, however, a substantial difference between ELF and fandom: despite the contingency of both types of communication, fandom has specific language that members need to become familiar with in order to be perceived by others as effective members of fandom or of the specific, smaller communities. The language of fandom and of individual fandoms plays an important role in the maintenance of social relationships and of a sense of community within these groups. In relation to this aspect, it might be more appropriate to compare ELF to CMC, and then associate, for example, fandom to certain contexts of ELF use, such as BELF or academic ELF, where Lingua Franca English exists alongside another linguistic register that participants in the interaction have to be fluent in to be successful in the interaction within that community of practice. Indeed, as Mauranen writes: ELF does not have a ‘target language’ because it is a vehicular language itself, an instrument for achieving communication. Although ELF is typically associated with fleeting encounters between strangers, it is also the working language of more long-lasting communities, for example business, trade, or academia. (2012, 6)

As with fandom, business and academia have a distinct vocabulary and register pertaining to their specific fields that participants in the interactions acquire over time and are necessary for the conversation to flow naturally and effectively.

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This suggests that while ELF and fandom may be described in terms of imagined communities, it has to be taken into consideration that both concepts also take shape as smaller, circumscribed communities when the need—or the will—arises. While it is not possible to define the totality of ELF speakers as members of a self-contained speech community, a group of international Erasmus students who engage in social and supportive activities in a foreign university, or a Japanese sales representative discussing payment and delivery with a French client over a Skype video conference are definable as communities. In the realm of fandom, the same kind of reasoning may be applied. Fandom as a whole cannot be reduced to a single, definable community, but within that abstract concept communities emerge and self-regulate online as well as offline. Posters engaging frequently and regularly in communication online, who have interiorised the idioms of practice of the communicative mode and the group, might be considered as active members of a virtual community. We have already discussed the status of community relating to such groups in the previous chapter, within a PSOC theoretical framework; online groups and therefore also fandom-related groups are conceivable as communities, despite their lack of a homogeneous geographical or sociocultural point of reference, on the basis of a common interest and a strong perception of community membership (Obst, Zinkiewicz, and Smith 2002b). In Rimskii’s words, “these groups are united by their shared activity, engaged in working with information and communicating on interests and priorities that they care about” (2010, 25). While these are mainly describable as interest-based groups, they might also fit a broader definition of community of practice (CoP) such as that put forward by Eckert: “a community of practice may be defined as an aggregate of people coming together around a particular enterprise” (2000, 35). By shifting the focus of the CoP from a more task-based (Wenger 1998; Herring 2008) or learning-oriented construct to a more social perspective, “its membership and the shared practice in which that membership engages” are highlighted as the defining elements of the CoP (Eckert 2000, 35). A more general definition of a CoP such as this would include the various facets of fandom-related interaction as well as ELF groupings, as theorised by Mauranen (2012, 19; see also Ehrenreich 2009 on BELF in CoPs). Multiple qualities associated with CoPs are also characterising of ELF groups: lack of locality and of long-term, continuous interaction in ELF groups is not incompatible with the notion of CoP. Mauranen emphasises the element of direct, face-to-face interaction in CoP as opposed to the non-local, indirect nature of discourse communities, where members might never meet in person (ibid.; 20–1). However, her reasoning is related to

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academic contexts which, despite having a number of overlapping characteristics with fandom in terms of complexity of structures and social formations, both local and non-local, have a stronger connection with physical locality than fandom, which functions pre-eminently in virtual environments. Indeed, in relation to blogging, an exclusively internetbased activity, she affirms that blogs might “fit in nicely with the notion of Community of Practice” (Mauranen 2013, 12). Both ELF and fandom cannot be conceived of as clear-cut, selfcontained, self-regulating communities due to their “amorphous” (Mauranen 2012, 18) nature and the contingency and super-diversity of their concrete realisations into circumscribed, defined groups. They elude the definition of community in its traditional, modernist sense, while at the same time displaying characteristics that make them recognisable as such, requiring a different theoretical framework for description and understanding. The linguistic aspect is obviously more prominent in ELF, as lingua franca uses of English lie at the very core of the ELF communities, whereas in fandom the social element is prevalent. Due to the complexity and heterogeneity of both ELF and fandom, it is not possible to encompass either of them within a single notion of community: multiple, alternative models of community might be suitable to account for the multiplicity of social formations that exist within these communities as wholes. In many cases, ELF and fandom coexist and overlap when fans from the four corners of the planet come together to discuss their favourite texts and English is chosen as the working language of interaction. Users might be members of both the fandom and ELF imagined communities on the basis of a mental image of affinity that links them to other fans and speakers of ELF as a whole. At the same time, they may be members of circumscribed ELF and fandom CoPs as they interact with other likeminded fans using English as the chosen language of communication. This is also the case for fan fiction writing in English, where fandom practices and ELF meet and facilitate the distribution of fan-produced texts for an international readership. The members engaging in fan fiction writing on the website FanFiction.net13 (FF.net), which is the data source of the fan fiction corpus that will be analysed here, might themselves be considered as a sort of imagined community, as all members of the website feel a certain degree of affinity by virtue of their shared status of fan fiction writers and readers. As with our previous reasoning, communities are then formed within the site thanks to its affordances

13

www.fanfiction.net. Accessed July 20, 2016.

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allowing members to create discussion groups and to comment on— review— the fan fiction posted by other fans. The popularity of manga/anime fan fiction in English on the internet and on FF.net makes for a good example of super-diversity. Despite focusing on Japanese animation, such communities are constituted by an overwhelming majority of non-Japanese members from a multitude of linguacultural backgrounds who choose to adopt English as the working language of their community by virtue of its global status. The heterogeneity of the linguistic and sociocultural elements brought into the communicative/productive environment by fans through interaction in discussion groups and feedback is reflected in the output, which displays the writer’s sociocultural repertoires. After the introduction to the universe of fandom and its practices in chapter one, the current chapter offered an overview of English as a Lingua Franca, the working language of many fandom communities and fan-produced texts. Due to the wide variety of studies and detailed analyses of ELF data carried out in the last 15 years or so, it was not possible to describe in depth all the linguistic and pragmatic strategies that have been identified in ELF talk. The focus was rather on the definition of ELF and the theoretical issues associated with it. ELF, fandom, and computer-mediated communication were identified as postmodern phenomena by virtue of their relation to the globalisation processes that have collapsed the spatial dimension and fostered long-distance, crosscultural social contact that may easily occur within virtual spaces, either synchronically or asynchronically. Their inability to fit within traditional and modernist paradigms was addressed, and alternative models were proposed for the notions under examination, underlining the similarities in the workings and structures of the ELF and fandom communities, which will be the data source for the corpus examined in the following chapters.

CHAPTER THREE CORPUS SELECTION AND METHOD OF ANALYSIS

3.1 Introduction to Fan Fiction This chapter aims to illustrate the methodological approaches adopted in the selection, collection, and analysis of the data that makes up the corpus of ELF fan fiction, as well as provide a detailed account of the methodological approach applied to the analysis of the corpus. In order to have a full understanding of the workings of the communities from which the data was drawn and the wide range of texts that will be encountered during the analysis, an introductory and more thorough description of the workings and mechanisms of this fandom practice is necessary. Fan fiction can be defined as “fiction written by fans about pre-existing plots, characters, and/or settings from their favorite media” (Black 2008, 10). Emerging in the 1930s within pulp fiction amateur magazines, and brought to wider attention and popularity in the 1960s when they were published and shared with other fans through the distribution of fanzines, fan fiction appeared on the internet in the very early days of online fandom. Fan fiction writing soon became one of the most popular fan practices, with an overwhelming majority of fans having read fan fiction at least once (Meggers 2012, 59). “The proliferation of online sites has opened fan fiction to a global and plurilingual population of writers and readers, while the number of canons … has increased exponentially, with fanons—or bodies of fan texts—emerging based on almost every book, television show, anime series, video game, or movie imaginable” (Black 2008, 11). The universe of fan fiction writing is vast and not limited to the actual practice of writing and publishing a text for readers to partake in passively, as will be seen in the preliminary analysis presented in this chapter. Fan fiction writing has proven to be more than the expression of a fan’s adoration for his or her preferred media texts; as they renegotiate the

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texts, writers also renegotiate their identity freely, outside the boundaries and limitations of mainstream culture and society.

3.1.1 Genres and types There is a multiplicity of strategies through which the original texts may be manipulated and remixed, and indeed the taxonomy of fan fiction can be quite large and multi-layered. The three main categories can be identified as: gen, het, and slash (Busse and Hellekson 2006, 10). These terms were originally used in relation to zines according to the fan fiction and article genre collected in a given publication. Gen, a clipped form of “general,” is used to describe stories that have no romantic elements in them; het is instead a clipped form of “heterosexual,” and marks stories that include romantic elements between members of the opposite sex. “Slash” stories centre “around romantic and/or sexual encounters and relationships between same-sex characters” (Allington 2007, 43). Except for a few notable exceptions of openly homosexual characters who may or may not be in established relationships (i.e: Brokeback Mountain, Queer as Folk, The L Word, and Will & Grace, to quote media texts with a strong homosexual theme), slash pairings are usually imagined by the fans themselves who perceive homosexual tension between two characters, most often males. Slash tends to be extremely popular in fandom, and its most vocal advocates are not gay fans—who are nevertheless involved in slash—but straight females. Presence and type of romance elements are not the only criteria of categorisation for fan fiction. The massive fan fiction archive, FanFiction.net, allows writers to choose from among 21 genres when publishing their work. Some of these are identifiable as traditional genres, such as adventure, crime, drama, fantasy, horror, humour, and science fiction. What is notable in a fandom context is that stories marked in these categories can involve the use of genre-shifting strategies, resulting in an alternative reading of the primary text and its characters. Other genres, on the other hand, are specific to fan fiction culture, such as angst and hurt/comfort. The first involves physical violence and emotional turmoil, and often results in character introspection pieces, or aims at making the reader empathise with the character. The second, as the name says, involves a character suffering physical or emotional pain and a second character that acts as a carer; this genre is commonly used to explore the romantic relationship of the characters involved. The categories listed by FF.net are easily recognisable by fan culture as a whole and may work as umbrella terms; however, as more involved fans know, alternative

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terminology and sub-specifications exist that are distinctive of the community. These are usually indicated either in the summary, so that they might be visible to potential readers from the browsing pages, or in the Author’s Notes (A/N). Whump indicates stories in which a character suffers physical and emotional abuse, whereas fluff is a light short story generally including romantic elements. AU (Alternative Universe) is a story set in a different universe than the primary text. OC (original character) indicates the presence in the story of a character that does not exist in canon. Individual fandoms may also have specific norms and names for labelling fan fiction. Fan fiction may also be categorised according to their relationship to the original narrative, such as episode tags for TV shows or missing scenes (Busse and Hellekson 2006, 11) which aim to build on canon or elaborate on unresolved or unsatisfying issues. Length may also be a classification factor: drabbles, for example, are one hundred-word short stories that became popular on LJ. Black also mentions a variety of hybrid genres: “these types of texts combine or hybridize two or more genres, such as song fan fiction (songfic) that combines narrative with song lyrics; poetry fan fiction (poetryfic) that combines narrative and poetry; and chat fan fiction (chatfic) that are fictions written solely as Instant Messenger or Internet Relay Chat” (Black 2008, 16). In more recent times, podficcing has emerged as a new fan fiction-related practice: podfic is a blend of podcast and fic, and involves the recording, by the author and/or other fans, of a fan fiction in a downloadable mp3/audio file; it might be compared to a fan version of an audiobook. The practice of recording fan fiction on audio supports—tapes and, later, CDs—was not unknown to fans,1 but it only gained a bigger following in its digital form in the mid-2000s when dedicated communities started to appear on LJ. The universe of fan fiction therefore includes an extreme variety in terms of genre, modes, and length. In the corpus, the majority of the fan fiction texts included have an underlying romantic theme, with a slight preference for slash, which remains one of the most popular elements in fan fiction on the whole. A small number of songfic are also included in the corpus, and these stories will be looked at in more detail in the data analysis; in the three cases, they constitute clear examples of heteroglossic practices at work.

1

http://fanlore.org/wiki/Podfic Accessed July 20, 2016.

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3.1.2 Publication and archives Before the internet era, fan texts were shared and circulated in fanproduced publications—fanzines—that were distributed among subscribers or sold at conventions. The advent of the internet and the web has effectively revolutionised the structure of fandom and, as a consequence, the fan fiction universe: easier access to fan texts has introduced many new aficionados to fandom and triggered an exponential increase of fan activities, including writing. Initially, the most common environments for the publication of fan fiction were dedicated mailing lists and newsgroups, and soon fans started creating personal websites where they archived their own stories as well as fandom-specific—or pairing-specific, or genrespecific—archives to which authors could submit their stories. Some of these archives became, in time, fan fiction hubs for writers and readers, such as Gossamer2 (The X-Files) and Harrypotterfanfiction3 (Harry Potter). The latter alone contains over 78,000 stories inspired by the popular series of books and movies. These now coexist with massive multifandom databases, among which the biggest remains FanFiction.net, founded in 1998 and today archiving hundreds of thousands of stories in various media categories: manga and anime, books, cartoons, comics, games, miscellaneous, movies, plays/musicals, TV shows, and a parallel section for crossovers. A more recently emerging archive is AO3—Archive of Our Own,4 which is still in its beta version; users therefore need to obtain an invite code in order to create a profile and post content on the site. Contrary to FF.net, which focuses on written stories only, AO3 aims to become a comprehensive database for all transformative fanworks: podfic fan art, and fan videos. AO3 also allows users to post sexually explicit material, which is banned on FanFiction.net; this makes it popular with large numbers of erotica writers. The archive was founded and at the time of writing maintained by volunteers of the Organization for Transformative Works5 (OTW), who believe in the right for people to write transformative works without fear of legal retaliation by the original media authors. Fan fiction may be published on blogging and microblogging platforms, such as LJ and Tumblr, and is often cross-posted on multiple

2

http://www.gossamer.org/ Accessed July 20, 2016. http://www.harrypotterfanfiction.com/ Accessed July 20, 2016. 4 http://archiveofourown.org/ Accessed July 20, 2016. 5 https://transformativeworks.org/about Accessed July 20, 2016. 3

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platforms at the same time in order to maximise exposure to the community of readers. Often, before publication, fan fiction is proofread and edited by one or more fans: this practice is known as beta reading. “A beta reader will read the story as a draft and will offer feedback and suggestions for improvement on all aspects of the story, from narrative structure and characterization to grammar and spelling” (Karpovich 2006, 174). This practice contributes to the continuing dialogue among fans and to the collective dimension of the renegotiation of the original texts (ibid.).

3.1.3 Projection of the self and resistance The permeation of the primary texts with personal narratives in fan fiction sometimes results in the transposition of the fans themselves, within their own stories. Fans write themselves as characters in their own fan fiction, creating an avatar of themselves that is often highly idealised and depicted as being superior to the canonical characters. Such original characters are known as Mary Sue and Marty Stu, even if the prevalence of the female version is overwhelming. The Mary Sue character “is presented as the beautiful, smart heroine who saves the day and then gets the guy, all to the virtual exclusion of the canonical characters” (Busse and Hellekson 2006, 11). Readers tend to be wary of these stories, “because of self-indulgence, their often hackneyed writing styles, their formulaic plots, and their violations of the established characterizations” (H. Jenkins 2006, 51). Other types of injection of personal elements and projection of desires and fantasies onto the remixed texts have raised the attention of fandom scholars within a theoretical framework that relates fandom to a form of resistance to mainstream culture (Fiske 1992; H. Jenkins 1992a) and gender (Leppänen 2008; Meggers 2012) and queer studies. While science fiction fandom was initially male-dominated, media fans who engaged in fan fiction writing from the 1960s onwards have been overwhelmingly female. This sparked an interest as to “the underlying motivations of why (mostly) women write fan fiction and, in particular, slash” (Busse and Hellekson 2006, 17). A feminist perspective is often taken: “many fan writers characterize themselves as ‘repairing the damage’ caused by the program’s inconsistent and often demeaning treatment of its female characters” (H. Jenkins 2006, 47), with women taking an anti-patriarchal stance against the stereotyped portrayal of women, such as Special Agent Dana Scully in The X-Files perpetually trapped within a Madonna/whore complex (Scodari and Felder 2000). Women write heterosexual shipper stories in order to rewrite the relationship between the characters as equals,

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untainted by the limitations of an underlying patriarchal bias that often casts a shadow on female characters in the primary texts. This feminist view adopted by many fans (see Wakefield 2001 on feminism in The XFiles) appears to be in direct contrast to the penchant many female writers seem to have for producing slash stories involving two men. Different interpretations have been given for this tendency: slash may be seen “primarily as female erotica or pornography written by women for other women” (Black 2008, 12; H. Jenkins 1992a), as well as a way “to project their own feminine romantic and sexual fantasies/desires onto the masculine bodies of the series’ characters” (Black 2008; see also Scodari and Felder 2000). In addition, it may also be a way to rethink and rewrite “traditional masculinity” (H. Jenkins 2006, 71) by writing men in roles that would not be found in straight, traditional couples. Male slash is overwhelmingly more common than slash involving women, which is known as femslash (Allington 2007, 44). This variety of slash has not received the same amount of academic attention as its masculine counterpart due to its limited diffusion (Russo 2002). For some fans, the issue of homophobia is pivotal and deeply intertwined in the practice of slash, and stories are found in which gay lovers face and have to cope with discrimination (H. Jenkins 2006, 74). In the light of this brief introduction, it can be said that fan fiction is more than the expression of a fan’s adoration for their preferred media texts; as they renegotiate the texts, writers renegotiate their identity freely. The internationalisation of fandom and processes of globalisation in the distribution of media has led to the creation of international fan communities where the working language is often English. Writers from all over the world may decide to publish their stories in English in order to share them with a wider audience. This results in the projection of different cultures and languages in the material that is circulated in fandom, adding an extra layer to the ongoing renegotiation and dialogue within the community. This introduction also had the specific aim of familiarising the reader with notions and terminology that will be recurring during the analysis of the corpus and will be useful not only to appreciate the complexity and diversity of the fan fiction experience, but first and foremost to contextualise and fully understand the processes underlying the uses of multiple languages that will emerge in the analysis of the corpus. In order to carry out an analysis representative of the ELF experience within the fan fiction universe, however, it was necessary to find a suitable selection of works among the wide range of types and genres available online, which will be illustrated in the following sections.

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3.2 Preliminary Criteria for the Selection of the Corpus The possibilities for doing linguistic research online appear to be infinite, as the internet is an enormous repository of textual data of a plethora of types and genres. However, this variety may be seen as a double-edged sword, as the heterogeneous and amorphous nature of the internet makes it difficult to identify and categorise all the potential texts that might be included in a corpus. Running a search with a web engine and saving the data, or using web-crawled corpora such as the Sketch Engine TenTen corpus family (Jakubíþek et al. 2013), may not be feasible. In order to compile a corpus representative of the target language under examination, and therefore suitable to provide unskewed answers to the formulated research questions (Biber 1993), ensuring that data fulfils specific criteria is of paramount importance; this is not always possible in an online environment. Due to the high degree of anonymity allowed by the internet, and due to the subsequent potential lack of information about the authors and sources of online texts, it may at times be impossible to judge whether a potentially fitting text may or may not be suitable for inclusion in the corpus. The following sections will present the criteria chosen for corpus compilation as well as the process of identifying ELF fan fiction online that could be included. Indeed, in order to be representative of ELF fan fiction, the corpus had to be constructed according to a number of specific criteria: (1) The stories included should be written in English by NNSs for the purpose of being shared with an international audience (2) The stories should not have undergone any process of revision, proofreading or editing by NNSs of English, who might have operated such changes as to eliminate ELF-relevant features otherwise present in the text (3) The corpus will have to be scanned manually for qualitative analysis: as a consequence, the total word count must be manageable for a single researcher The three criteria above were identified as the preliminary conditions for the creation of the corpus. A number of further issues emerged during the process of selection of the texts to include in the corpus, which led to the implementation of additional criteria to optimise the compilation of the corpus. The first major choice that had to be taken is related to the source of the online data: as mentioned above, fan fiction can be found in a variety

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of online environments, from personal journals and community journals on LJ to discussion forums, websites, and multifandom archives (e.g. FF.net, AO3). In the end, the choice was FanFiction.net. Multiple aspects were taken into consideration that influenced the final decision: FF.net is a thriving fan fiction archive that fosters social interaction among its members; for this reason, it is a very active site, visited daily by great numbers of fans. The social features embedded in the website make it easier to determine whether a specific writer is still active on the site and whether they are easily contactable by virtue of the Personal Messaging feature. As the archive collects a high number of fan fiction pieces from a plethora of different original texts, it would make it considerably less time-consuming to find the right type of fan fiction—that is, a text representative of written ELF that has not been proofread or edited by ENL speakers—in one single location on the web. In fact, it would possibly be one of the very few viable options. Searching online for single author or single fandom fan fiction archives, and from there singling out NNS-written stories untouched by beta readers, would be like looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack. In order to find enough such stories to create an appropriate corpus, it was necessary to have access to a sophisticated search function that could point directly to the right type of fan fiction. This latter issue was one of the main reasons why a preliminary attempt to use LJ as a complementary source of data was unsuccessful: the amount of non-fan fiction material on the platform, combined with its limited search functions, made it challenging to pinpoint fan fiction in the output. As will be seen, the research function of FF.net provided a viable tool for the identification of appropriate data for the corpus. .

3.2.1 Selection of data source: FanFiction.net FF.net was briefly introduced above as currently the biggest multifandom database. Founded in 1998, it hosts hundreds of thousands of stories in several different categories, including a range of popular media: anime/manga, books, cartoons, comics, games, miscellaneous, movies, plays/musicals, and TV shows. More recently, the site has created a parallel section for crossovers, which we have defined as stories blending elements from two or more original sources. The home page lists all these categories, so that visitors looking for stories to read may immediately start browsing the site by clicking on the desired category. Each of those links leads to a page that lists all the individual original texts that have

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inspired fan fiction published on the site, including the number of stories for each text. The texts are listed in alphabetical order by default, and visitors may run a search by alphabetical letter; alternatively, they may sort the texts by popularity, which means that the most popular texts will be those that have inspired the higher numbers of published stories. The site has now expanded beyond the limits of the single website, embedding its Twitter updates so that they might be visible on the homepage and linking to a blog where site-relevant news—such as updates, the introduction of new tools and affordances, scheduled downtimes, etc.—is posted. In order to publish stories, authors are required to set up an account on the website; the writers, who can choose their own pen names and thus remain anonymous, have a number of tools at their disposal that are not only exclusively related to the act of uploading and publishing their stories online. Some are useful for the writers to monitor the success of their work, such as the stats tool, which tells authors how many people have visited their profile page and their individual stories during a determined timeframe. Others are more socially oriented, devised to foster interaction among writers and between writers and readers,6 allowing the participatory element of fan culture to be expressed in a variety of ways. In addition to the reviewing system, which allows both members and non-members of the site to leave feedback on the stories and on each chapter in multichaptered stories, members can contact each other privately through a personal message function or interact in the forum sections, where members can open either writing-oriented topics or engage in fan talk on site-embedded boards dedicated to specific media texts. Members can also offer to beta read stories for writers by filling in a dedicated form on their FF.net account. Members can also personalise their profile pages where they are free to introduce themselves and their work. Personal information about age, location, education, or work is fairly common, as are lists of interests either in or outside of fandom. In addition to these common basics, authors appear to include a variety of elements on their profile pages that they find desirable to share with their readers and other writers. Ongoing fan fiction projects or potential new plots to be developed in the future are not 6

The boundary between writers and readers is blurred in fan fiction practices and this tendency is carried over onto FF.net. Site members are usually both writers and readers, but fans who only wish to read may still join the site and participate by leaving comments and reviews on the stories or on the forums. This is an important element of fan fiction participatory culture, and it highlights the participatory and collective aspect of fan fiction writing (Karpovich 2006).

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uncommon examples; some distance themselves from the fan fiction universe and add favourite quotes or links to other websites such as deviantART, LJ, Tumblr, and Twitter. This latter aspect shows an interest in further communication beyond one single fandom practice, as writers promote their non-fan fiction related products, such as fan art (e.g. deviantART) and foster network building (e.g. LJ, Tumblr, Twitter) with other like-minded fans. Members are also allowed to upload a profile picture, which is often related to one of their fandoms of interest: in the case of the authors whose work was included in the corpus, they frequently displayed manga and anime characters in their profile pictures, since most of them write primarily in these media categories. FF.net has a sophisticated archive system that can filter fan fiction according to a number of different criteria, allowing readers to look for exactly the type of story they prefer within a single fandom. Readers may choose among 21 genres—action/adventure, humour, romance, etc.—a range of languages, the rating7 of the story, the length, and whether the story is ongoing or finished; they may also express their preference in relation to the main characters they would like to see in the story. The favourite story/author system allows registered members to add individual stories or an author to a favourite list, and thanks to a parallel story/author alert system readers can sign up to receive notifications when a story is updated or when an author has published a new story. In addition to these affordances, FF.net also provides a number of search options that offer visitors the means to look for a specific word or phrase within stories (title or summary), authors, forums, and communities. This function specifically proved to be extremely useful in the process of identification of suitable data for the corpus.

3.2.2 Narrowing the scope: manga and anime Once the main source of data was identified, it became necessary to select which media category to focus on. Fan fiction was seen to be inspired by a wide variety of original texts pertaining to each of these media categories. Stories written by ELF users could potentially be found in any of those, be it books, TV shows, movies, or comics. However, a choice was made to narrow the research to the extremely popular category of Japanese manga and anime. This decision was motivated by two interrelated reasons. 7

Stories on FF.net are rated, similarly to movies and TV shows, for suitability for a certain audience. The rating is decided by the author in accordance with the content of the story.

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In manga and anime, which originate in Japan, the original text is not rooted in the ENL linguistic context, a condition that is instead very common in many popular texts spanning great amounts of fan fiction (e.g. science fiction TV shows and fantasy books). Even though such texts may not be set directly in an Anglo-American context, the cultural and linguistic background of the country of production—most likely the United Kingdom or the United States—would still be discernible in the text and, as a result, influence fan fiction writers in many ways. Writing for those texts might urge non-native writers to try and sound “more native,” at least for the sake of authenticity in relation to dialogues and characterisation; this would recreate a situation where non-native writers are required to immerse themselves in British or American culture and stick to a native speaker model in order to give an accurate depiction of the characters and settings. In contrast, manga and anime would reflect the nature of ELF settings more fully, as they are an exemplifying product of a super-diverse, globalised environment such as fandom. In Black’s words: the emphasis of anime fan fiction writing does not center on English-only or print-based forms and conventions of writing and North American cultural values. Instead, interactions between writers and readers illustrate a cosmopolitan, shared appreciation for multiple languages, different cultural perspectives, and alternative forms of text. (2008, 78–9)

As the source texts do not relate to ENL culture, writers may not feel obliged to observe Anglo-American linguacultural norms closely for accuracy and authenticity in characterisation—which is very important to most fan fiction writers. One alternative way to work around this issue would be collecting data from fan fiction inspired by certain science fiction or fantasy texts that are not rooted in the real world and therefore not affiliated to any actual present-day culture (e.g. fantasy books/movies such as The Lord of the Rings or TV shows such as Battlestar Galactica for science fiction). However, as said above, these texts could be problematic as they would still be somewhat influenced by a preeminently Anglo Weltanschauung, and, in the mind of fans, associated with the countries of production. Nevertheless, not all manga are set in contemporary Japan. The variety of plots and settings found in the manga universe leaves room for science fiction set in Earth’s future or in space, entirely fictional locations, or historical stories taking place in Europe. It is not uncommon for such texts to include supernatural and fantasy elements that deviate the focus of the story away from the cultural background of its geographical setting (e.g. the manga D.Gray-man, set in nineteenth-century England, has a

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supernatural theme). Stories inspired by these original texts were still considered suitable for the corpus, as the representation of non-Japanese countries is usually mediated by the Japanese cultural background as well as the presence of Japanese characters. Manga and anime offer “representations of sexuality, gender, culture and history” (Black 2008, 6) that differ substantially from those found in mainstream products, which highlight the cross-cultural element of manga/anime fan fiction in opposition to a convergence towards the Anglo experience that would once again put NSs in a privileged position. We might go as far as saying that ENL speakers writing manga/anime fan fiction are writing from an ELF perspective as well, as they are negotiating meaning that falls outside their cultural experience alongside other international fans, resorting to sociocultural and linguistic repertoires that go beyond English. Indeed, “cultural and linguistic hybridity is particularly salient in anime-based fanfictions because anime is a Japanese cultural production, and many of the series are set in Japan or China and incorporate many elements of Japanese and Chinese language and culture” (Black 2005b, 123). Such cultural and linguistic elements are often found in such texts, so as to locate the action and signal the cultural background of the chosen text and its characters in a more incisive manner. Manga and anime have become overwhelmingly popular in many countries, where translated versions are distributed. While they are often dismissed as simple comics and cartoons, they actually display “a wealth of complex, believable characters, intricate narrative structures, and many themes that address the light and dark aspects of the human condition” (Black 2008, 4). Such media, in light of their recently acquired international popularity, have raised academic attention outside the field of Japanese studies, and are being viewed in terms of their role as pop culture elements in a globalised world (see Black 2008, 5, for a list of references). Manga and anime fans often refer themselves as “otaku,” a term that originally had a negative connotation in Japan and was linked to obsessive behaviours (ibid., 6), in addition to being stereotyped “as being antisocial and isolated from the world at large” (Eng 2003). The negative undertones associated with the word appear to be consistent with early representations of fans in the West. However, the term tends to have developed a more positive connotation outside Japan, where fans call themselves and each other otaku (Black 2008, 6; Eng 2001, 2003) to identify themselves as aficionados of Japanese comics and animation. While manga and anime in the West have generally been considered as aimed at a younger audience, in reality they range across a number of different genres and target different audiences, from young children to post-adolescents and adults.

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Black (2008, 3) offers a broad categorisation of manga and anime according to the target audience: josei/redikomi for adult females, dealing with daily life issues; and seinen for men, which displays a wider range of topics. The term kodomo (child in Japanese) describes a genre of manga aimed at younger audiences. For older children, shǀjo manga is geared towards females, while shǀnen manga are for boys and have a higher level of action content. Within these broader categories, a number of subgenres exist—including science fiction, cyberpunk, historical themes, and pornography (hentai) stories involving homosexual relationships (yaoi and yuri)—which paint manga and anime as widely diverse media types and attract large numbers of fans outside Japan, fostering cross-cultural communication among international fans where English is used in its lingua franca role.8

3.2.3 Finding suitable stories: ELF writers self-evaluating their competence in English Once the media category was chosen, searches were run within the manga/anime section for specific strings of words that would suggest that the stories would be written by a NNS of English, without the intervention of an NS beta reader. Several strings were inserted into the search box in order to maximise the chance of significant results in the output: “my first/native/mother language”; “bad English”; “sorry for (any) mistakes/errors.” The use of these strings would bring up in the results stories for which the authors had thought it necessary to apologise in advance about any non-conventional language that the reader may find in the text by pointing out that English is not their native language; this, therefore, provided a raw list of potentially suitable ELF fan fiction. Such disclaimers are not uncommon among non-native internet users engaging in ELF communication online: indeed, this practice is not exclusive to fan fiction writing, but it has been attested in other virtual environments. Barton and Lee noticed a tendency for “participants to position themselves as not-soproficient English users” (2013, 119). Their Flickr informants appeared to use negative affective expressions when describing their competence in English, with adjectives such as “‘bad,’ ‘terrible,’ ‘poor’” (ibid., 117). Positive self-assessments were few and far between, which suggested that 8

Black (2008) identifies a number of prominent sites dedicated to manga and anime that act as hubs in the network of fandom and are extremely useful for the understanding of these digital environments, how users operate within them, and the role of such spaces within global flows of information.

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non-native users of English lean towards downplaying their proficiency in the language. The same attitude was observed in Italian bloggers posting in English on LJ in Vettorel’s (2014) study. The writers of the blogs included in her corpus “often overtly express their lack of confidence and ‘linguistic insecurity’ frequently feeling the need to apologise about their ‘poor’ English” (257). Her data also showed that discussion about competence in English among non-native LJ users was taken up in the comment section of the blogs, fostering social interaction among ELF users. In preliminary results on the WrELFA corpus, Carey (2013b) recently noted the same tendency in scientific academic blogs, where posters expressed their status as NNSs and apologised for their inadequate English. Such attitudes are not limited to online environments, but a number of studies (Hülmbauer 2007; Hynninen 2010; J. Jenkins 2007) showed a widespread feeling among NNSs that their English was not good enough when compared to the native speaker model. As Hülmbauer points out: ELF users are very often very conscious of their special status as nonnative language speakers. As they all share this position, there is a great deal of identification with each other. Sometimes, the lack, or insecurity in “correctness of form” in terms of linguistic knowledge is even foregrounded by the interactants themselves. (Hülmbauer 2010, 103)

In fan fiction writing, these types of disclaiming expressions might have a pre-emptive role, in that they warn their readers before they start reading that they might encounter non-normative language in the text, therefore shielding themselves from potentially harsh criticism in reviews. It is actually not uncommon for readers to pick up on the disclaimer and add a positive comment on the writers’ English, minimising in most cases the occurrence of non-ENL language and reassuring the writer about their writing ability. At times, writers themselves explicitly ask readers to point out any mistakes in the text so that they might fix them and learn from them, engaging in a dialogue with the reader and partaking in the participatory aspect of fandom. This tendency for ELF fan fiction writers to signal their non-nativeness in the story’s summary in the A/N proved to be useful in identifying potentially suitable ELF fan fiction for the corpus compilation. Sometimes, NNSs have a fellow fan—usually but not necessarily an ENL speaker—proofread (or beta read, in fandom lingo) their work before publication. In that case, the beta reader is usually thanked by the writers in the A/N, as it is customary in fandom to acknowledge and credit the work of other fans.

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It has to be said, however, that ELF writers are not the only ones preemptively apologising about their competence in English. The practice is also found in ENL-written stories (Macklem 2012, 214) where writers warn their readers that they may encounter mistakes and errors in the story due to their “not being good at English.” Such results were filtered out of the search output on the disclaiming expressions given that they were NSs. Other types of stories that were excluded from the corpus involved characters trying to learn English; regardless of the author’s L1(s), they were deemed as unsuitable, as they may include deliberate instances of non-normative language pronounced by the characters still in the process of learning the language.

3.3 Fans Come First: Some Ethical Issues of Online Research Once a list of potential stories had been compiled, the following step entailed contacting the writers in order to obtain permission to use their texts in the research corpus. A preliminary message stating the nature of the research with a request for permission was sent to the authors from my personal FF.net account by means of the website’s personal messaging system. The message included my academic email address. That address not only had the function of an alternative means of communication, but also acted as a further indication that the message was neither spam9 nor a scam. Upon receiving a positive answer to the preliminary message, I sent a more detailed informed consent form, providing more details on the type of research and the use that would be made of the data, to be sent back “signed” with the author’s pen name. By signing the form, the authors were stating they were over 18 years of age—it was decided, for both ethical and legal reasons, to not include works written by authors who were not 18 at the time they were contacted. As many underage pre-teens and teenagers engage in fan fiction practices, many potential non-native authors were excluded a priori when the age stated on the profile did not correspond to at least 18 at the time the search was being run, and others still had to be removed from the lists when they revealed themselves to be underage upon receiving the informed consent form. Permission from writers was sought for two main reasons: one legal, one more ethical in nature. The first one pertains to the website’s policy, which states that 9

“Spam, n.,” OED Online, December 2013, Oxford University Press, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/185525?rskey=UCERHv&result=1.

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User Submissions published on the site cannot be exploited in any way that goes beyond personal use, without the explicit written consent of the owner. Even if the site had not included a specific reference to the copyright of User Submissions, the decision would still have been made to ask authors for permission to add their stories to the corpus for ethical reasons. Indeed, collecting data from the internet can be tricky from an ethical point of view, even though at a first glance the internet might appear an enormous repository of data. As Frankel and Siang point out: the vast amount of social and behavioral information potentially available on the Internet has made it a prime target for researchers wishing to study the dynamics of human interactions and their consequences in this virtual medium. Researchers can potentially collect data from widely dispersed populations at relatively low cost and in less time than similar efforts in the physical world. (1999, 1)

Internet data is also the pre-eminent source of information for online phenomena, such as the virtual communities and fandom practices that are under examination here. Texts and strings of language, such as those published online in blogs, discussion forums, Twitter pages, Facebook accounts, and fan fiction sites may be considered freely usable by some researchers if they were published with a public setting. As a result, they do not deem it necessary to ask for the writer’s permission before taking the data (Frankel and Siang 1999, 7; Haigh and Jones 2005, 5). As Busse and Hellekson state, “to a humanities scholar, the notion that something is published and freely available means that permission to critically discuss the work is implicit” (2012, 38). However, it might be objected that the texts were posted for a particular audience in a specific moment, and not for a researcher to collect, analyse, and publish (Herring 1997; Elgesem 2003). Indeed, fans and fan fiction should be approached with a different mindset than other types of internet data. Especially where fan fiction is concerned, “it is not ethical to ignore fans’ expectations of privacy—an expectation that is absent in the traditional publishing model” (Busse and Hellekson 2012, 39): when fans publish, they do not do so through the mainstream means of text dissemination, but decide to upload their texts online for a specific readership, enclosed within the fandom community. The fandom community is perceived as a private space, which leads writers to assume a certain stance in relation to the privacy of their work that the researcher wishing to investigate such texts has to take into consideration. Bruckman (2002) suggests that data may be taken and used without permission only

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in a few, very specific cases: when the information is publicly archived; when access to the archive is not password protected or does not requires registration; when the archive’s policy does not prohibit it; and when the topic is not highly sensitive. However, the low sensitivity of the topic may still not be a viable justification for a researcher to take and use internet data for any purpose, as “there is a difference between what is publicly accessible and publicly distributed” (Frankel and Siang 1999, 11) and it still may infringe on the poster’s privacy. This is indeed the case for fan fiction: The context of the shared space, the desire some fans have to separate their real-life self from their fan self, the fear of unwanted attention, the danger of inadvertently outing a fan by providing information that would permit a writing pseudonym to be linked to a real-life identity, the desire to retain total control over an artwork (Busse and Hellekson 2012, 39)

may urge fan fiction authors to be very protective of their privacy, as exposure as a fan in the author’s real life may have negative consequences in their personal and work lives. Even if in most cases writers are protected by anonymity, generally writing under pseudonyms, it might still be possible, given enough background information, to link the writer’s fan identity to their real one. In addition, pseudonyms, when used consistently, as in fandom, may for the people behind them have the same importance as their real-world identity. Therefore, by quoting the pseudonyms as well as the source of the data, the researcher might inadvertently make people recognisable within their online communities (Frankel and Siang 1999, 6). For this reason, it was deemed ethical to ask the writers for their permission, and once obtained to protect their online identity by anonymising the data (Adami 2010, 246; Haigh and Jones 2005, 6, Busse and Hellekson 2012, 45). In the guidelines for the peer-reviewed, online-only academic journal Transformative Works and Cultures (TWC), a section was added dealing explicitly with the protection of fan sources which strongly recommended that researchers obtain permission in advance to quote and link the texts (Busse and Hellekson 2012, 45), which was the policy adopted for this research, as illustrated above. Anonymisation of data was also a crucial point in obtaining the permission to include fan fiction in the corpora: a number of writers agreed to sign the form only on the condition that their pseudonym would not be revealed. A choice also had to be made to minimise the amount of fan fiction segments published here, as a search on any website such as Google would easily link back to the actual webpage hosting the story, resulting in a loss of confidentiality and

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anonymity. In addition, a number of other precautions were adopted to avoid this occurrence from taking place: for instance, character names in story segments employed as examples were changed where possible. Romanisation of Japanese terms was also uniformed in the text, as writers often romanised Japanese items according to different conventions or phonetically. This choice also contributed to making the story segments published here more difficult to track back to the original fan fiction webpage. The ethics of data collection and personal contact with the writers, in this specific experience, were influenced by my familiarity with the workings of fandom and fan fiction; as a result, I was perceived by the authors as an insider in the shared space of FF.net. The coexistence of academic and fannish interests is not uncommon in scholars working on fan studies; however, both advantages and disadvantages are involved with the status of scholar-fan, or acafan (see chapter one, 1.2.2).

3.3.1 The researcher as an insider In social studies, especially where qualitative and ethnographic research is concerned, the role of the researcher within the community under investigation is an important element to be considered, and it has been the subject of debates for many years. Indeed, “it is crucial for social researchers to clarify their researchers’ roles especially for those utilizing qualitative methodology to make their research credible” (Unluer 2012, 1). In this case, as I have personal experience of fandom practices and fan fiction reading and writing, I may be positioned as an insider in the community under investigation. A number of advantages have been identified in relation to the role of insider researcher: they have a greater understanding of the community they are studying; their participation does not alter the flow of social interaction; and their established familiarity with the culture fosters truthful collaboration with the subjects (Bonner and Tolhurts 2002, 8–9). As the researcher was not present at the time the involved subjects produced the data later collected, the second advantage does not apply in this context. However, being an insider researcher also has disadvantages that may somewhat skew the objectivity of research findings, as researchers struggle between their roles as researchers and personal affiliation to the group under investigation (DeLyser 2001, 444– 6). Similarly, fandom as a specific research field has its own pros and cons for the insider researcher. My personal experience as a fan was quite likely a facilitating element in both the identification of suitable data and during communication with

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the writers. My familiarity with social and productive practices of fandom gave me a head start in identifying an appropriate source to collect the data for my corpus and find a way to approach the authors on FF.net with what might have been an unusual and suspicious request. Being a long-time registered member of FF.net placed me as an insider to the world of fan fiction and fandom, even if not specifically in the manga and anime categories. Indeed, some of the authors I contacted explicitly stated that they were glad to help “a fellow writer” and did not hesitate to answer small queries about their work, also offering additional information about their relationship with fandom, manga, and anime. My status as an insider in the community, in addition to facilitating communication with the writers involved in the research, allowed me a deeper understanding of the workings and mechanisms of the fan fiction universe, and as a result helped me to navigate the environment with relative ease. It is not uncommon for researchers working on fandom studies to have personal experience with fan practices, in which case they are known as Aca/Fen, acafans, or scholar-fans. Hills (2012) points out the drawbacks of such an approach and the potential criticism that it may draw. The main point raised is that scholar-fans may “become overly celebratory of fandom” (17) by carrying out research from an insider’s point of view that may somewhat be positively biased towards fans and their practices, and, in addition, towards certain types of practices, “when a scholar mediates his/her own area of fan experience without engaging with alternative or rival modes of fan activity” (19). Busse and Hellekson are similarly aware of the sensitive position of the scholar-fan and draw attention to “the inherent dangers of being part of the community analyzed and the biases this may create in terms of objectivity and selection of analyzed works” (2012, 41). This type of background may result in academic work that reflects the fandom-related interests of the scholar-fan, in that attention might be focused on the elements and practices of fandom that the scholar is invested in outside academia. On the other hand, lack of investment in certain areas of fandom on the part of scholar-fans may lead, in turn, to a lack of representation and analysis of such aspects of fandom, producing unbalanced outcomes. A parallel issue is constituted by the othering of fan activities located outside the scholar-fan’s area of pre-existing investment, resulting in the “symbolic annihilation or exnomination” of such practices (ibid., 21). While scholars-fans such as Henry Jenkins (1992a, 2006, see also Coppa 2006; Black 2009a) have contributed to bringing fandom and its related aspects and issues under academic light in multiple fields, it is also suggested that personal investment in fandom may constitute a hindrance to successful academic, scientific work on the many and diverse

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elements of fandom. A balance thus needs to be found between remaining “a participating member within a subculture while simultaneously researching and writing academically about these communities” (Busse and Hellekson 2012, 41). While the criticism exposed in Hill (2012) is sensible and may potentially raise concerns as to the objectivity of the scholar-fan, it is important to note that my pre-theoretical investment in fandom has not biased in any way the choice of data source and the aspects of fandom investigated in this research. While the idea of exploring fandom in relation to ELF was first influenced by my knowledge of fandom outside the academic environment, the following steps, including the selection of fan fiction as a suitable data source for ELF analysis and the identification of the manga and anime universe as the most representative category of the cosmopolitan and intercultural nature of ELF within fandom, were unconstrained by my previous experience of it.

3.4 The Corpus Out of the 81 non-native writers contacted, 26 eventually agreed for me to collect their un-betaed stories in English, inspired by either manga or anime. A few of the writers who were willing to give their permission, however, had to be excluded from the project, as they were still underage at the time the corpus was collected. Once the final list of writers had been compiled, the relevant stories were downloaded into a single document where the header10 section was excluded. The final word count for the corpus was calculated at 248,464, which fulfils one of the main criteria illustrated in 3.1, that is size manageability for manual scanning and qualitative analysis. The size of the contribution to the corpus by each author varied according to their prolificacy in the manga/anime category, as well as to the number of proofread stories—when applicable—in the writer’s work. Indeed, the writers differed significantly in terms of prolificacy: some of the writers only had a few short stories published on their profiles, whereas others had a number of ongoing, multi-chaptered stories that, at over one hundred thousand words, may be considered novel length. In order to find a balance in the data, it was decided to give a word limit per author of around twenty thousand words, so that one or more

10

A fan fiction header has the aim of introducing the story by providing information including title, fandom, rating, summary, and Author’s Notes, alongside disclaimers and warnings for sensitive themes, when the latter applies (Black 2009a).

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single authoors would not be over-represented, possibbly resulting in skewed results. Fig. 3.1. Worrd count per lannguage

As can be sseen from thee data, manga/anime appeear to be very y popular worldwide, as a variety of speakers of European languages—including varieties of Spanish spokken in South America—are A e represented alongside a speakers of Asian languages, attesting to the global nature of inteernational fandom. The underlying intention wass to have a w well-balanced corpus in terms of lingguistic represeentation; howeever, among tthe authors, In ndonesian speakers—eeither living in Indonesiaa or in Euroope as imm migrants— appeared to be more proolific, which resulted r in a ggreater amoun nt of text written by L L1 Indonesiann speakers in the corpus; tthis consisted of about 24% of the total word count. Other weell-representedd first languag ges in the corpus are S Spanish, at aroound 18%; Freench, at 13%; and Finnish with w 11% of the word count; while the other lang guages are atteested at below w 10%, as can be seen in Fig. 3.1 above. The diveersity and heterogeneity off the FF.net paarticipants will also be highlighted in the followiing sections, as a a closer loook will be tak ken at the writers and how they enngage in actiivities and prroject their global fan identities wiithin the FF.neet environmen nt.

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3.5 The Writers W Data about tthe authors’ L1s L was eitherr retrievable ffrom the author’s page or disclosedd by the fanns themselvess following a direct querry during personal correspondence with the ressearcher. Thee authors reprresent 11 different L1s, as distributeed in Fig 3.2 below. b Fig. 3.2. Writters’ native langguages

As can be seeen by compaaring Fig. 3.2 with Fig 3.1,, the number of o writers for each lannguage is not directly pro oportional to the number of words included in the corpus foor that particu ular languagee. The reasons for this will be illusstrated below and are relateed mostly to tthe selection criteria c of the stories to be incorpporated in thee corpus, as well as the intrinsic diversity off the individuaal writers. Wiith such a sm mall and heterogeneous sample of w writers, it is inndeed difficult to make genneralising obsservations about the writing habits of o a specific L1 L subset as tthose found heere. They display a very high degree of diversity, not only in liinguacultural terms but also as fanddom members and fan fictio on writers theemselves; this diversity is expressedd in many wayys, not only th hrough the fann fiction texts per se. A look at the w writers’ profilee pages and sttory lists can aalready show a number of aspects inn which writeers differ, eveen within the same media category. First of all, writers show w a wide rang ge of fandom--related intereests, from fantasy literrature to Am merican comiccs and comicc-inspired mo ovies and cartoons, as well as TV shows, s for wh hich they also publish fan fiction f on

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FF.net. The heterogeneity and the intertwining of fan interests in fan fiction are not limited to explicit crossover stories. For instance, in an A/N at the end of a story chapter, one writer makes two different references to two other original texts. As she is describing a hospital scene in the chapter, she mentions her love for Grey’s Anatomy, an American TV medical show. In addition, she provides, as a closing formula, a line in the Ancient Language, a fictional language found in Christopher Paolini’s Inheritance Cycle, a series of fantasy novels. As this example suggests, writers move smoothly and fluidly between their interests, frequently projecting their identity not only as fans of a particular manga or manga/anime in general, but expressing their multiple affiliations directly, potentially providing other points of connection with readers. The example described above illustrates the heterogeneity, diversity, and interconnectedness of fandom: for many of these writers, manga/anime is their primary fandom interest, with the vast majority of their work focusing on either, but the same is not true for others for whom it is only one among multiple fandom interests. In such cases, the writer’s focus is usually circumscribed to one or two favourite source texts in that media category. Prolificacy, as seen in the previous section, also varied considerably among writers. Some of these writers were extremely prolific, with long lists of published fan fiction in various categories, writing new works of various lengths and updating their ongoing stories regularly. Others had only a few stories on their page, sometimes very short and dedicated to only one or two main fandoms. The characteristics and diversity of the fans/writers involved in the creation of the corpus illustrated above are consistent with the results of the survey carried out by Meggers, whose respondents “identified 140 different fandoms as their ‘primary fandom’ and were typically multi-fannish, or active in several different fandoms as well as fandom genres (e.g. television drama, sci fi, comic book)” (2012, 59). Meggers’ respondents also similarly engaged in a variety of fan practices, including “reading and/or participating in discussions concerning the media source (93%), watching and/or creating fan videos (70%), and reading or posting news, interviews or spoilers about the fandom (97%).” This output reflects the habits of the writers taken into consideration in this study, contributing to the definition of fandom as a super-diverse and rhizomatic environment. The data reported above shows a heterogeneous sample of writers from a variety of linguacultural backgrounds, who engage in multiple fandoms and multiple practices within their respective fandoms. The nature of the data under examination, which combines ELF with CMC and traditional

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written literature, requires that a specific methodology of analysis be adopted that would be appropriate to the study of plurilingual practices. A mixed approach was deemed the most suitable choice, as it would take into account traditional functional frameworks that have already been successfully applied to ELF studies (Gumperz 1982, Klimpfinger 2007; 2009; Cogo 2009) as well as more recent approaches that aim to explore and describe plurilingual practices occurring in globalised environments, including CMC (Androutsopoulos 2013a; 2013b; Jørgensen 2008; Otsuji and Pennycook 2010; Leppänen 2012; Barton and Lee 2013).

3.6 From the Bilingual Paradigm to Code-switching in the Global Era The same processes of globalisation that have triggered a deconstruction of social and linguistic traditional tenets—such as the myth of the native speaker in relation to ELF and that of community as a geographicallybound, linguistically homogeneous group of speakers—have similarly prompted a redefinition of the traditional code-switching paradigm. Globalisation and translocal practices, alongside digital communication, have problematised the traditional perspective and approaches to codeswitching; research is developing in order to construct new theoretical frameworks and methodologies of analysis that can account for the new uses of plurilingual resources and strategies in entirely new contexts of international and cross-cultural communication. In the past three decades, scholars have tried to provide descriptions for the phenomenon of code-switching, however, “we still do not have a reliable and comprehensive model of how bilingual talk can become socially and interactionally meaningful” (Auer 2011, 29). Research on code-switching has been developed from different perspectives, from the syntactic to the cognitive and the sociolinguistic. A sizable aspect of codeswitching studies involves research on the syntactic or morphosyntactic constraints regulating language alternation (e.g. Poplack and Sankoff 1984; DiSciullo, Muysken, and Singh 1986; Belazi, Rubin, and Toribio 1994; Mahootian and Santorini 1996). Attention to the syntactic aspect of code-switching coexists alongside research oriented to functional and social aspects of language alternation. A number of studies were carried out with the aim of identifying the functions of code-switching phenomena, soon orienting to a more interpretive and interactional approach (Heller 2007, 12). These latter approaches have the aim to “explore more directly the ways in which bilingual resources could be involved in the construction of social meaning” (ibid., 13). Code-switching

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may thus be conceived of as a “contextualization cue, i.e. a resource used by participants to frame their interpretations of what is being said” (Androutsopouls 2013b, 669; Gumperz 1982; Auer 1999). Language choice may be related to both the communicative situation at hand and the participants themselves, who may use language alternation for the purpose of projecting and negotiating social identities and interpersonal relations. Code-switching may either be an unmarked or marked choice (MyersScotton 1997); in the first case, the language choice is expected, whereas in the second language alternation is employed to fulfil specific functions within the interaction. It has to be noted that traditional definitions and functional frameworks of code-switching are mostly related to its occurrence in speech. Gumperz, the first theoriser of code-switching functions, defined conversational code-switching as the “juxtaposition within the same speech exchange of passages of speech belonging to two different grammatical systems or subsystems” (1982, 59). His functional framework included six major functions: quotations; addressee specification; interjections; reiterations; message qualification; and personalisation vs. objectivisation. As to quotations, code-switching is triggered by “direct quotations” or “reported speech”: speakers are here quoting what someone else has said in a different language than the one chosen for communication in a specific interaction (ibid., 75–6). In addressee specification, the switch has the function to “direct the message to one of several possible addressees” (77). Interjections are also common elements in code-switching, and the switch may serve “to mark an interjection or sentence filler” (ibid.). Reiterations may fulfil a number of functions, that is, clarification, amplification, and emphasis (78); in these cases, a specific message is repeated in two different codes, and the switch may entail a certain degree of alternation within the message. Message qualification involves the use of code-switching in “qualifying constructions such as sentence and verb complements or predicates following a copula” (79). The last function identified by Gumperz consists in personalisation versus objectivisation, where the switch may occur in a number of contexts to mark “the distinction between talk about action and talk as action” (ibid.), speaker involvement, statement of personal opinion or knowledge, or reference to specific instances or common knowledge. Appel and Muysken (1995, 118) suggested a functional classification of code-switching that is compatible and partially overlapping with the one just described, drawing its inspiration from Jakobson (1960) and Halliday et al. (1964). In this perspective, code-switching may therefore fulfil a number of functions: referential; directive; expressive; phatic; poetic;

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metalinguistic. Lack of knowledge in one language triggers the switch in a different one and realises a referential function, while in switches associated with the directive function, using a different language may either include or exclude a person from the conversation. The expressive function works as a marker of “mixed identity through the use of two languages in the same discourse” (ibid., 119); switches marking the change in tone of the interaction fulfil instead the phatic function. The poetic function refers to switches involving jokes, puns, etc., and finally the metalinguistic function is associated with the presence of direct or indirect comments regarding the languages used in communication (120). Auer (1999, 312), in his typology of bilingual speech, identifies other essential characteristics of code-switching in contrast to other types of language alternation phenomena. He distinguishes between personal and group code-switching, where the latter entails that a number of rules must be followed that are valid within that specific community. An additional distinction is made between alternational and insertional code-switching. In the alternational type, return to the first language is not usually predictable after a switch (ibid., 313–4). On the other hand, insertional code-switching consists of “a content word (noun, verb, rarely adjective/ adverb) [being] inserted into a surrounding passage in the other language” (314). In both cases, code-switching is a marked use of the speaker’s linguistic repertoire that signals otherness to the other participants, who may either infer a specific communicative aim or relate the switch to a temporary failure in coming up with the desired word in the language of communication (ibid.). This description of code-switching, especially where insertional codeswitching is concerned, might be fitting in an ELF framework. The crosscultural nature of interactions and the variety in linguacultural backgrounds brought by the participants to the communicative event make insertional code-switching a much more likely event in ELF talk than alternational code-switching (Klimpfinger 2007, 2009). Indeed, the latter would possibly entail a certain degree of fluency in a language other than English for all the participants involved. Otherwise, it would not be possible to maintain mutual intelligibility over a long stretch of conversation. However, as will be seen in detail, high proficiency is not an essential prerogative for the occurrence of code-switching. As Auer points out, code-switching is possible even with a very limited knowledge of the “other” language (1999, 312). This situation is not uncommon in contemporary language used in the globalised world: even back in 1982, Gumperz himself predicted that globalisation processes and the subsequent increase of linguistic contact would affect the frequency of the code-

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switching and borrowing phenomena: “with the increasing displacement of formerly stable populations and the growing ethnic diversification of metropolitan centres, the communicative use of code switching is more likely to increase than to decrease” (1982, 64). This prediction has found its realisation in the past couple of decades. With the increase of transnational and transcultural flows across the planet, the reality of bilingualism and multilingualism has become a visible reality, even in countries where monolingualism has always been the norm. As Jørgensen states, “the use of languages of which the speaker knows only very little is more common in late modern urban societies” (2008, 168). Communities of linguistic migrant minorities, as well as temporary mobility (tourism, education, work) and digital communication, have all fostered language contact and, as a result, increased a number of linguistic phenomena related to such occurrences, among which are borrowing and codeswitching. In addition to the increase of such phenomena, a variation in the context and type of code-switching occurrences has taken place, which has led to an extension of the definition of code-switching beyond its traditional boundaries. Code-switching can no longer be understood exclusively as the change of code in bilingual speakers who are fully competent and fluent in both languages, but also as the exploitation of all the linguistic resources at one’s disposal in order to fulfil certain functions or aesthetic effects within the communicative events, including the written text. Jørgensen speaks of “bits and pieces” of other languages and varieties appearing in contemporary speech, despite the speakers having no functional command of the source language/variety these elements were drawn from (ibid., see also Rampton 1995 in relation to language crossing). This tendency was noticed especially in younger people growing up in highly internationalised urban environments, due to their increased—in both quantity and frequency—contact with different languages. These young people acquire and internalise a small number of features of a given language and then use them in their speech, without having full command of the language: “The use of features from several different languages in the same production has become frequent, especially in in-group interaction, even when the speakers apparently know very little of several of the involved languages” (Jørgensen 2008, 168). The increase of “nonstandard mixed language practices” of this type and their contrast to the traditional perspectives on multilingualism has also been highlighted by Blommaert and Rampton (2011, 7). Such practices, they remark, go beyond the “alternation between the home vernacular and the national standard language,” and speakers appear to adopt and employ a number of features of styles and languages of which

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they do not have full command. Language use of this type appears especially linked to “recreational, artistic and/or oppositional contexts” (ibid.), and is drawn from ethnic groups, new media, and pop culture, and in line with Jørgensen’s study it is found more frequently in the speech of younger people.

3.7 Code-switching and ELF As was seen in previous chapters, such occurrences are not limited to young urban dwellers (Jørgensen et al. 2011, Rampton 2011); international CMC, which we will revisit, has also been identified as a site of plurilingual practices (Leppänen and Peuronen 2012) as well as ELF interactions (Vettorel 2014, Poppi 2012). Even when a choice is made on a single working language, i.e. English, in which all interlocutors are fluent enough to carry out successful communication, features of other languages —either the speaker’s L1 or an LN—may still occur in the interaction. The super-diversity of ELF interactions (Cogo 2012b) involves the occasional occurrence of languages other than English that are not only symptomatic of the multiplicity of linguacultural backgrounds of ELF users, but are employed consciously for both pragmatic and social aims. Indeed, all ELF users may be considered multicompetent, where multicompetence is defined as “knowledge of two languages in one mind” (Cook 2007, 17), as they are functional in at least two languages: English and their L1. The notion of multicompetence originally emerged in relation to the second language acquisition framework, but it is extendable to include the type of language use made in non-educational settings, such as ELF encounters (MacKenzie 2012). In the multicompetent mind, the two—or more—languages do not exist as separate entities, but are intertwined and integrated in a continuum (Hall et al. 2006). The multicompetent speaker does not activate one language at a time, but “stands between two languages, even when apparently using only one, having the resources of both languages on tap whenever needed” (Cook 2002, 5). As Franceschini points out, multicompetence is a “dynamic, evolving system” (2011, 351) that accounts for the complex communicative and accommodative strategies that ELF speakers employ while engaging in meaning-making. Franceschini, in her 2011 study, provides a working definition that has been elaborated on in the study of multicompetence in the LINEE11 project, where multicompetence is described as “part of the 11

LINEE (Languages in a Network of European Excellence) Project http://www. linee.info/; overview on the Work Package dealing with multicompetence

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individual capacity of a person and develops in interaction with his or her social or educational environment” (ibid.; see also Alptekin 2010). Therefore, the ELF speaker is no longer seen as a deficient user of English compared to a monolingual mind, but as a speaker with plurilingual competences that may be used in different contexts to fulfil communicative and social functions. ELF users have different ways of drawing on their plurilingual resources, as in the cross-linguistic influence examples discussed in chapter two where creative forms influenced by other languages facilitated communication in international ELF settings (Hülmbauer 2007). Similarly, “ELF participants in blogging discourse draw on the variegated resources of their plurilingual repertoire, and do so in creative ways, exploiting the potentials of the virtual language—as findings in other contexts of spoken ELF discourse have shown” (Vettorel 2014, 205). Indeed, the participants’ plurilingual repertoires in ELF are not only expressed in terms of alternational or insertional code-switching, but they also seep through the interaction as they influence the creation of new coinages, or semantic expansions, to fulfil the users’ communicative aims. However, as will be seen, writers in fan fiction are more conservative in their drawing from the potentials of the written language; they do exploit their sociolinguistic repertoires, including their—more or less limited—knowledge of features of other languages, in order to construct successful narratives. In ELF, code-switching is employed as a sort of umbrella term to include a number of phenomena related to the use of two or multiple languages in a given interaction, such as code-mixing and borrowing in addition to code-switching (Pölzl 2003; Cogo and Dewey 2006; Klimpfinger 2007, 2009; Cogo 2009, 2011). This more encompassing approach to code-switching events will be adopted for the analysis of our corpus, as it “allows for a more flexible consideration of types of codeswitching” (Klimpfinger 2009, 350) and covers a variety of plurilingual practices as identified in the corpus, as in Klimpfinger’s findings; that is, “word-fragments, single words, and clauses up to whole passages” (ibid.). Such phenomena, as anticipated in chapter two, fit in the ELF framework to the extent that users employ all their resources in order to achieve their pragmatic and social goals, and switching into a different language for a content word, function word, or longer phrases may fulfil such a pragmatic or social necessity. ELF speakers may “[co-construct] http://linee.info/work-packages/thematic-area-c-multilingualism-andeducation/wp-8a-in-search-of-multi-competence-exploring-language-use-andlanguage-values-among-multilingual-immigrant-students.html. Accessed July 20, 2016.

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meaning by exploiting their linguistic resources and actively accommodating each other, involving at times the direct use of their own or their interlocutors’ L1” (Seidlhofer 2011, 117; Cogo and Dewey 2006). Indeed, the speakers’ linguacultural backgrounds should not be considered as detached from ELF communication; on the contrary, “they are integral elements of ELF situations and combine with individual constellations which entail a rich linguistic potential beyond English” (Hülmbauer 2013a, 53). This potential may be expressed through language choices involving plurilingual phenomena. Code-switching is “a locally situated and complex phenomenon in the multilingual framework of ELF, where speakers are at least bilingual by definition and have to deal simultaneously with English, their first language and possibly other languages, and may potentially code-switch into all of them” (Vettorel 2014, 209). However, code-switching appears not to occur very frequently in ELF talk (Klimpfinger 2007, 46). This may be due to the functional and context-bound qualities of ELF, which is not associated with any stable speech community. Participants of ELF interactions come from a variety of linguacultural backgrounds and the linguistic and sociocultural repertoires they bring into the conversation might be very different; however, “using English as their only common means of communication, speakers do not, by definition, share equal knowledge of each other’s’ first languages” and of other LNs (ibid.). As a consequence, code-switching in ELF may not occur often, but when it does it is frequently a marked linguistic choice, which may fulfil a number of social and communicative functions within a given event, contributing to the success of the interaction as an important accommodative strategy (Cogo 2009, 108; Seidlhofer 2011, 99). Studies on conversational code-switching in ELF found that it is involved in four major types of communicative strategies: specifying an addressee, appealing for assistance, introducing another idea, signalling culture (Klimpfinger 2007, 46). These partially overlap the functions of code-switching first identified by Gumperz (1982), but they do not match exactly: ELF users may adapt plurilingual practices to fit the communicative needs of the speakers in a given interaction and facilitate intelligibility and social rapport. Klimpfinger’s (2007) study on code-switching in ELF spoken interaction described the functions code-switching appears to fulfil in ELF talk. Specifying an addressee equals Gumperz’s addressee specification, while appealing for assistance consists in switching to an L1/LN in order to solve a meaning-negotiation issue (Klimpfinger 2007, 48). Language switches may also occur to mark the introduction of another idea: a change

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of topic may trigger a change of language, as it is thought that a specific topic should be addressed in a different language (ibid., 50). Switches signalling culture occur when the speaker may wish to project their bilingual/multilingual identity to their interlocutors or signal solidarity with another participant. Such switches are frequently interjections such as tags, exclamations, and parentheticals (ibid., 54; see also Klimpfinger 2009). Single words and short phrases—usually nouns, adjectives, and function words—are the most frequent types of switches: Klimpinfger theorises that this may be the case as “words with high frequency in L1 are easier to access than the corresponding L2 forms or that they are less important for the understanding of the conversation” (2007, 57). This tendency was noticed in the written fan fiction corpus as well, in line with Klimpfinger’s (2007, 2009) and Meierkord’s (2002) findings. The use of code-switching in ELF talk, therefore, is not linked to a stable speech community where all participants have access to the same language systems on a more or less equal footing: a variety of languages and cultures come into play in ELF interactions, and speakers are not limited to referencing their primary linguaculture as they communicate with others, but they can draw from a multitude of resources in order to achieve their communicative and social aims (Klimpfinger 2007, 51). English is seen by ELF users as an additional language of communication; they do not “[use] the language to qualify for membership of a pre-defined community” (Seidlhofer and Widdowson 2007, 368). They might use languages or features of languages, as we have seen, not to qualify for membership of a pre-defined, stable speech community in ethnic and cultural terms. Furthermore, uses of both English as a lingua franca and features of other languages seeping into the communication may be marking membership and affiliation to a different type of community, too; one that is not geographically and culturally-based, but finds its root in common interests and practices. Code-switching in ELF may also be employed to mark the speaker’s identity, in which case the L1 is most likely the language used, or to express solidarity with someone else’s linguistic and cultural identity, as suggested by Pölzl: the use of the L1 “depends on an individual speaker’s preference, the context of a contact situation and its communicative goal” (2003, 4), while the LN, which is generally the L1 of one of the other participants, may be employed to express solidarity with the interlocutor and build social rapport, converging “into a specific temporary group” (ibid., 15) created within the context of a given interaction. Instances of code-switching in ELF may also be related to projection and signalling of identities and group

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membership: “speakers’ and thus also ELF speakers’ identities are never static but they are constructed within interaction and can involve membership in various groups” (ibid., 7). The corpus under examination fits well within the ELF framework; however, the ELF context represented by international online fan fiction also involves digital environments and CMC, which is a fertile ground for the study of plurilingual practices.

3.8 Code-switching and the Globalised Internet The spread of the internet and of its variegated modes of communication has increasingly drawn attention to the phenomenon of code-switching from the point of view of CMC, as the variety of modes of communication offered by online environments, coupled with the international and global nature of many virtual interactions, provide a fertile ground for codeswitching analysis. Online multilingualism “can refer to the practices of multilingual Internet users and the ways in which they draw on resources provided by more languages than one in their CMC” (Leppänen and Peuronen 2012, 385). Studies on the topic (Georgakopoulou 1997; Hinnenkamp 2008; Tsiplakou 2009) indeed show that, in addition to engaging in code-switching practices as traditionally defined, participants use their plurilingual resources at their disposal, involving other languages, varieties, or pidgins, etc. These switches not only have pragmatic and social roles in the interaction, but they are a reflection of the participants’ sociolinguistic repertoires. As a result, “sociolinguistic investigation of spaces of CMC … open up a window to the multilingual practices of diverse online communities” (Kytölä 2012, 107). We know, however, that online communication includes a variety of modes; therefore, CMC may not be conceived as a single genre, but different features associated with it may be highlighted and employed more frequently according to the communication platform and the affordances offered. Plurilingual practices are similarly varied according to CMC mode and context; Androutsopoulos (2013b, 671) distinguishes between two types of code-switching in CMC: conversational and nonconversational. The first may be “dyadic or multiparty, synchronous or asynchronous,” the second “edited and published by a single author.” He also distinguishes between “multilingual or heteroglossic spaces” and code-switching (ibid., 672): the first may be associated with media sharing sites such as Flickr (Barton and Lee 2013) and Facebook (Androutsopoulos 2013b) where instances of multiple languages may occur in well-defined, separate places, or different languages may be used by different authors in

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the same space; in the latter, language alternation is employed by the same author (Androutsopoulos 2013a). Due to the vast variety of communicative environments online, codeswitching phenomena may fulfil a number of different functions in CMC. Androutsopoulos identified and highlighted a number of communicative functions by drawing from accepted categorisations of conversational code-switching: (a) switching for formulaic discourse purposes, including greetings, farewells, and good wishes (b) switching in order to perform culturally-specific genres, such as poetry or joketelling (c) switching to convey reported speech (as opposed to the writer’s own speech) (d) switching with repetition of an utterance for emphatic purposes (e) switching to index one particular addressee, to respond to language choices in preceding contributions, or to challenge other participants’ language choices (f) switching to contextualize a shift of topic or perspective, to distinguish between facts and opinion, information and affect, and so on (g) switching to mark what is being said as jocular or serious, and to mitigate potential face-threatening acts, for example through humorous CS in a dispreferred response or a request (h) switching to or from the interlocutor’s code to index consent or dissent, agreement and conflict, alignment and distancing, and so on. (Androutsopoulos 2013b: 681)

Androutsopoulos named the use of different languages in online environments “networked multilingualism” (2013a, 3). This expression “is a cover term for multilingual practices that are shaped by two interrelated processes: being networked, i.e. digitally connected to other individuals and groups, and being in the network, i.e. embedded in the global digital mediascape of the web” (ibid.). Androutsopoulos’ definition of networked multilingualism is compatible with other similar approaches that will be addressed in detail in section 3.10 below, and will attempt to account for the new, globalised uses of multilingual resources that have moved beyond the traditional definitions and categorisations of code-switching and bilingualism. Such definitions are also suitable for inclusion in ELF interactions in online environments. Language use in international digital environments is also influenced by the tension between the global and local, where users from a variety of linguacultural backgrounds interact with one another in an international, deterritorialised context (Hepp 2009; Leppänen et al. 2009). These two

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dimensions, however, coexist within online spaces of social interaction and shape the way in which participants project the local as they engage with the global, exploiting their linguistic and sociocultural repertoires and adopting accommodative strategies in communication in order to function successfully in the super-diverse universe of the internet. Language choice in online communication and creative practices such as fan fiction (Black 2008; 2009a; Leppänen et al. 2009) is influenced by “questions of identity and intended audiences” (Barton and Lee 2012, 291). Often, language use online goes well beyond the choice of using different languages to communicate in different contexts: styles, varieties, and languages mould and merge together within the selected primary language of communication, and “participants draw on resources provided by other languages, and thus produce linguistically mixed discourse” (Leppänen and Peuronen 2012, 391). In order to understand how people participating in online groups use language to foster social bonds and create content, “it seems reasonable, then, to look into the actual social activities and practices surrounding such multilingual writing online” (Lee and Barton 2012, 130). Chapters one and two have attempted to provide a descriptive and theoretical background to the practices of the online communities involved in this research. The rhizomatic qualities of internet communication and fandom in particular have highlighted the multiple facets of manga/anime fandom and its varied environments and practices. Here, members—both as users of a specific product and as active agents in discussing and remixing the original material—build their sociocultural repertoires layer upon layer and project the relevant elements when they see fit in order to achieve their communicative and social aims. As Leppänen points out, “the Internet does not simply impose images of cultural globalization on us; it also provides us with opportunities to engage with these images in different ways, and in doing so provides affordances for meaningful social action, interaction and cultural production” (Leppänen 2012, 233, emphasis in original).

3.9 Tying it all Up: Code-switching in ELF Online While many studies of code-switching online are concerned with immigrant and diasporic languages, as well as with the “Englishization” of other languages online (Androutsopoulos 2007, 222), code-switching in ELF online contexts has not been ignored. Using English as a working language in international online groups is very common, and participants bring a variety of linguacultural backgrounds to these interactions, which

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may result in instances of code-switching in the participant’s L1 or LN: as in face-to-face contexts, “[l]anguage users employ whatever linguistic features are at their disposal to achieve their communicative aims as best they can, regardless of how well they know the involved languages” (Jørgensen 2008, 163). Indeed, in ELF contexts, “it cannot be assumed that there is extensive language contact between the languages involved or that users of ELF are highly and equally bilingual” (Pölzl 2003, 9). The use of plurilingual resources on the part of ELF users, in both online and offline environments, is not necessarily related to their L1 or an LN they are fluent in, but rather to their sociolinguistic repertoires (Blommaert 2008), which they have built over time and which they will exploit to project figments of their identity and contribute to meaning-making. As Cogo states, “ELF speakers make use of their shared resources by adapting them in-situ according to the sociocultural context where they are operating and considering interlocutors’ perceived sociolinguistic repertoire and known-in-common practices” (Cogo 2012b, 290). Indeed, fan fiction writers not only engage in meaning-making strategies, as they interact with their readers and fellow writers with the aim of producing an enjoyable product for them, but also employ in-group language that signals a shared membership in the manga fandom in particular, and in fandom in general. Fans, as such, have a common repertoire that they can draw from as they engage in linguistic and social practices online; this repertoire of language and practices provides a common ground for members of the group to rely on and facilitate communication. These linguistic elements, introduced in chapter one (1.3.1) and elaborated on in this chapter in relation to fan fiction, are however related to the in-common linguistic practices developed within fandom itself, rather than the cultural or linguistic elements internalised from an existing culture. While this type of in-group language is not the focus of this investigation, a small number of instances will be looked at where it acts as an additional resource for communicative and social purposes. Fandom is not an example of a stable bilingual speech community, as members bring with them very different sociolinguistic repertoires via English as their chosen language of communication. In this context, codeswitching is not a marker of a fully bilingual—and potentially bicultural— identity where participants in the communicative events are all fluent in the languages in use. The widespread use of “token Japanese phrases and lyrics … to index their insider status within the anime fan fiction community and to affiliate with the Asian origin of the media” (Black 2009a, 414) in the corpus is indeed understood when approached from a

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sociolinguistic perspective that takes into account the contexts in which Japanese as an LN appears consistently. Japanese culture, and by extension its language, has acquired value within circles of fans of products stemming from that culture: manga and anime as well as videogames and pop music, known as J-pop. Using the language in fan talk and other related creative practices, such as fan fiction, marks the users as insiders in the manga/anime fandom, and therefore their identity as otaku, in addition to signalling the source culture of the chosen material. A comparable situation is pointed out in Androutsopoulos (2013b) as an anecdotal example: members of a German-based group of salsa fans with different linguacultural backgrounds would “orient to Spanish as a symbol of their common cultural practices, and the usage of Spanish in this forum is often formulaic” (2013b, 679). This type of language usage “illustrates that the relationship of bilingualism and identity in media discourse may extend beyond the performer’s own ethnolinguistic background to practice of language crossing, in which speakers appropriate (fragments of) languages that are significant in the local context without necessarily having full command of them” (Androutsopoulos 2007, 215). In order to analyse this type of ELF in CMC data, it is necessary to identify a theoretical and methodological framework that may account for the complexity of plurilingual phenomena involved in the practice under examination.

3.10 Code-switching, Polylingual Languaging, and Heteroglossia The literature above has shown that in contemporary uses of ELF, as well as CMC, the traditional definitions and functional frameworks for codeswitching are no longer suitable to describe the wide range of contexts and language crossing phenomena occurring within these super-diverse contexts. As Heller points out: What emerges now is a sense of bilingualism as only one perspective on a more complex set of practices which draw on linguistic resources which have been conventionally thought of as belonging to separate linguistic systems, because of our own dominant ideologies of language, but which may more fruitfully be understood as sets of resources called into play by social actors, under social and historical conditions which both constrain and make possible the social reproduction of existing conventions and relations, as well as the production of new ones. (2007, 15)

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A number of alternative perspectives on the traditional bi/multilingualism paradigm have been elaborated on to provide an encompassing theoretical and methodological background accounting for language mixing uses in translocal practices. Jørgensen proposes the notion of “polylingual languaging” in opposition to the traditional multilingualism norm (2008, 169). The term polylingual, adapted from Hewitt (1992), sets itself apart from multilingualism, which entails the “(more or less ‘full’) command of several languages” (Jørgensen 2008, 169). Languaging, on the other hand, is used to define the behaviour entailing the use, in speech, of features belonging to different languages in order to achieve the speaker’s communicative aims. In addition, polylingual languaging does not necessarily involve the complex integration of one language into the other. Polylingual languaging is not the only alternative theorisation to the traditional code-switching paradigm that sees speakers as fully bilingual/multilingual. Otsuji and Pennycook (2010) adopt the notion of metrolingualism, which “refers to creative linguistic conditions across space and borders of culture, history and politics” (2010, 244). It rejects the idea of languages as closed systems, and is concerned instead with “languages as emergent from contexts of interaction (ibid., 246). The connections between language, culture, and ethnicity take a backseat, as the fulcrum of metrolingualism relates to language use and identity construction through languages in cross-cultural interaction. The notion of metrolingualism, while not opposing polylingualism, maintains a stronger link with issues of language ideology, which it problematises as it offers a view of language use as a socially and contextually bound practice (ibid., 248). The two approaches just described are not significantly different from the concept of heteroglossia, as proposed by Leppänen, which was preferred as a methodological point of reference due to its direct concerns for the specificity and distinctiveness of the fan fiction practice, as we will see below. The term heteroglossia (Bakhtin 1981; see also Hinnenkamp 2008) has been used to define “a range of linguistic and discursive resources available for self-expression, communication and identification” (Leppänen 2012, 236). Linguistic heteroglossia is not limited to the exploitation of elements and features of different languages for meaning-making and social purposes, but it also includes employing features from a particular variety or style of a specific language (ibid.). In addition, linguistic heteroglossia may appear in two different forms: a mixed style that exploits resources from multiple languages, and code-

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switching, where the use of multiple languages aims to “contextualize meanings within a discourse entity” (Leppänen 2012, 236). The mixed style is not only concerned with the insertion of lexical and phrasal items in the texts, but refers to uses of linguistic resources at the speaker’s disposal, regardless of the linguistic background they are taken from. This type of heteroglossia may be related to in-group language uses too, and it relates back to Jørgensen’s notion of polylingualism (2008) described above and Otsuji and Pennycook’s metrolingualism (2009). The notion of mixed style may be adopted to define uses of plurilingual resources occurring in interactional contexts such as fan talk, blogging (Vettorel 2014), and other social media environments (Androutsopoulos 2013b; Barton and Lee 2013). Where code-switching is concerned, Leppänen’s approach appears to be oriented towards uses of plurilingual resources that “can function as one means with which writers can foreground particular meanings and possibilities for interpretation” (2012, 237). This perspective is specifically conceived with the practice of fan fiction in mind, as plurilingual strategies may be employed by international writers as narrative cues in their texts that support contextualisation and reader interpretation. For example, “code switching can indicate transitions from one discourse type to another (e.g. from narrative text to dialogue) and shifts in narrative position; it can also provide one means for characterization and the evocation of a particular setting” (ibid.). Leppänen’s heteroglossia-based approach can also be related to discourse; it addresses certain aspects of fan fiction as a remixing practice. Indeed, discourse heteroglossia involves the “selection, combination and juxtaposition of discursive resources, for example, aspects of genres, modalities and intertextuality within a textual entity” (Leppänen 2012, 237). As it can be inferred from the definition above, once again fan fiction fits very well within this framework, as intertextuality and remixing are at the very root of creative fan practices. Intertextuality is inextricably bound to fan fiction, as the stories themselves are reworkings of source texts which offer alternative readings, but a wide range of heteroglossic elements may be found even within a single story. The example of crossovers is emblematic in this sense: they occur when two fictional universes are merged to create a new text that incorporates elements from both. The notions of linguistic—with its two different forms—and, to a lesser extent, discursive heteroglossia as presented by Leppänen, were thus deemed an important theoretical and methodological point of reference for this investigation, in combination with more traditional frameworks as applied to the ELF experience (Gumperz 1982; Klimpfinger 2007, 2009). While Leppänen does not take

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the ELF approach into consideration in her research about plurilingual strategies in web writing, her definition can nevertheless account for language use in less-interactional CMC genres and online practices such as fan fiction writing. Her theorisation of linguistic heteroglossia may also, at least where fan fiction is concerned, fill in the methodological gap in written code-switching highlighted by Sebba. He laments a lack of an independent theoretical framework for the analysis of written codeswitching due to a lack of specific studies, and remarks that, in general, the frameworks adopted are those that refer to conversational code-switching (2012, 1). The importance of the visual and spatial aspect of written codeswitching is also highlighted, which may provide additional information on language usage in these settings. While traditional conversational code-switching analysis may still be more appropriate when applied to CMC modes that are highly interactional, such as synchronous communication, they appear less effective for CMC modes that are less interactional in nature, such as blogs, and, in our case, fan fiction. Indeed, Leppänen and Peuronen themselves “call for an analytic approach that makes use of concepts and methods developed in the context of narrative analysis” in the investigation of plurilingualism in fan fiction texts. (2012, 392; see also Androutsopoulos 2013b, 676). A more literary perspective in the analysis of mixed style and code-switching instances in fan fiction texts would allow a more insightful perception of the role and functions of these strategies in the construction of amateur narrative texts. However, conversational code-switching theory may still be useful in this research, as instances of code-switching and linguistic hybridity occur in direct speech within the texts taken into consideration, and it was therefore also deemed of interest to see whether the linguistic functions identified in spoken code-switching occur in written, staged dialogues as well. The analysis of the compiled corpus of ELF fan fiction will thus take both approaches into consideration in order to achieve a detailed and in-depth understanding of mixed language usage in this fan-related practice. It should also be noted that the notion of code-switching may be seen as limiting and insufficient to encompass the complexity of the phenomena involved in the super-diverse context of ELF communication, where languages are no longer seen as self-contained, separate identities. The boundaries between languages in a multilingual speaker’s repertoire are fuzzy, as they treat “the diverse languages that form their repertoire as an integrating system” (Canagarajah 2011, 401). However, a formal classification of plurilingual elements was made using categories traditionally associated with code-switching for clarity and convenience.

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Before delving into the analysis of plurilingual phenomena in fan fiction texts, the next chapter will elaborate on the figure of the writers as ELF authors. It will attempt to describe how they negotiate their identities as non-native writers in English in an international environment and situate themselves in relation to their own texts, and how, as plurilingual users, they engage in linguistic heteroglossic practices when addressing and establishing a dialogue with their readers.

CHAPTER FOUR WRITERS AND READERS: PLURILINGUAL IDENTITIES IN THE PARATEXT

4.1 Translocality and the Paratext Fan fiction writers engage in a variety of social and creative practices in international environments that may be defined as translocal, in that they communicate and interact outside a circle of local peers: members of fandom bring very different backgrounds to these spaces of communication, in terms of geography, ethnicity, nationality, culture, and language (Leppänen 2012, 235). In turn, they themselves engage with the community in a translocal fashion, functioning “as local participants in a global fan culture” (ibid.; Leppänen and Piirainen-Marsh 2009). While engaging with the community via a shared language of communication, interspersed with vocabulary that is distinctive and relevant to the activities of the group, fans project different elements of their linguacultural identity that may contribute to social cohesion and the realisation of creative products. Fan fiction writing differs from traditional, published fiction in a number of aspects. Most importantly, the relationship between writers and readers is biunivocal and not as clear-cut: authors address their readers directly through Author’s Notes, and readers talk back through the immediate and privileged channel of the comment system on FF.net. Additionally, as many fans who enjoy reading fan fiction also write stories of their own, the roles of writer and reader are often fluid. Fans shift between these two positions on FF.net as well; many registered writers not only use the site to showcase their work, but review and comment on other writers’ stories in their fandoms of interest. This dialogue between writers and readers and among fans is useful in gaining a deeper understanding of the fan fiction writing experience. This is true especially for ELF users who, introducing themselves as authors in an international environment, project and negotiate their identity with their readers as non-native writers and fans of Japanese comics and animation. Translocal, super-diverse traits of fandom and of the practice of fan fiction emerge from the

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additional information that accompanies the stories and that might be defined as the paratext of the fan fiction (Herzog 2012): these include the authors’ profile pages; the header, which in turn is made up of the title, rating, summary, and A/Ns; A/Ns published at the beginning or at the end of a given chapter in multi-chaptered stories published over a length of time; and reviews by readers. The latter element was included due to the characteristics of the FF.net site, which allows reviews to be linked directly to the original text and be visible to all readers of the story. Through the data presented in the following sections, an overview will be provided of the social processes the writers are involved in when they engage in fan fiction writing within the participatory virtual environments such as FF.net. Analysis of the headers and the reviews will clarify a number of points about the writer’s own feelings about their use of LF English as creative writers in an international environment and the reviewers’ attitudes towards these NN writers. Plurilingualism in the paratext is also looked at, starting from the writers’ own choices in terms of which language to use to write a specific fan fiction to instances of other language use in the identified elements of the paratext. As will be seen, reviewers also draw from their plurilingual repertoires in commenting on the stories to fulfil pragmatic or social functions.

4.2 Writing for Local and Global Audiences For writers with plurilingual competence, writing in one language over another is usually the result of a deliberate choice that may depend on several factors. As was seen in chapter two (2.4), multilingual internet users may switch from their local language to the global language according to the context and the image of themselves they want to project, as well as the audience they want to target (e.g. Barton and Lee 2013; Leppनnen et al. 2009; Vettorel 2014). In most cases, participating in an international environment where fan-produced texts are shared and circulated among a vast, heterogeneous community entails the adoption of a working language of communication, here—as in many other cases— identified with English. The chances for social contact are much higher in a super-diverse, international fandom environment, as pointed out by Leppनnen et al.’s informants, who recognised the value of English as an entryway to such global networks and cosmopolitanism (2009, 1086). Local fandoms may not have the same level of attractiveness for fans, especially when communities revolving around a particular text in their L1 are small and possibly inconsistent in terms of activity and productivity. This may result

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in a much smaller potential readership, as well as opportunities for regular and fulfilling social contact, which has been identified as an antecedent to the sense of virtual community (Koh and Kim 2003, 77; Tonteri et al. 2011, 2216). As a consequence, it may be more satisfying for fans to engage in fandom activities in a thriving environment, such as international fandom. Still, many international writers do not choose to write exclusively in English, but alternate between English and their L1, and other LNs. In the corpus I collected, out of 26 writers, 16 write in both languages, and 8 of those write in their L1 more often than in English. Language choice seems to be influenced by the size of the local fandom, as introduced above, which appeared to be the case with Indonesian speakers who are very well represented in the corpus. With a large community of Indonesian speakers active on the site, writers may have a tendency to maintain a presence in their local fandom to a certain degree and favour publishing in their L1 over writing in English for a bigger audience. It is not uncommon for writers to translate fan fiction written in their L1 into English in order to share it with a wider audience, especially when the story was successful in the local fandom. Five of the writers whose work was included in the corpus described one or more of their English fan fiction as translated from their L1. This practice may not be uncommon when writers are transitioning from writing exclusively in their L1 to publishing in English as well, as appeared to be the case for three of the five writers who published translated works, who might use the translation as an experimental way to get acquainted with writing in a different language and to find their footing before writing directly in English. However, not all writers produce texts in their L1, and only participate in fandom in its global form: indeed, 10 writers in my corpus published exclusively in English, to varying degrees of prolificacy and story length. The distribution of languages in the writer’s fan fiction is often not matched in their author profiles. 21 writers in the data have created a profile page where information about them is shown, such as lists of fandoms, interests, and links to other websites, in addition to the author’s bios. Out of those 21, 15 had their profile pages only in English, even if their primary writing language for fan fiction is their L1. Four of them included both their L1 and English in their pages; with the exclusion of an introductory paragraph about the author that appears to give the same basic data in the two languages, the amount and type of information provided differs according to language. Only two writers had author profiles entirely in their L1, and in this case the language choice for the

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profile fit that of the stories published on the account, which were preeminently in the L1. The distinction between English, the writers’ L1(s) and other LN(s)— where applicable—is sometimes not clear-cut, as authors tend to exploit their plurilingual repertoire not only within the text, but also in the title, summary, and A/N section of the story, which is what readers first encounter when browsing fan fiction on the FF.net site. Authors may give English titles to some of the stories written in their native language. The opposite situation was also found, where English stories are given titles in a different language that might or might not be the author’s L1. In the latter case, the language used was Japanese, which is consistent with the original linguaculture of the texts inspiring the stories. This tendency was observed especially in relation to a specific manga, Hetalia: Axis Powers,1 whose characters are personifications of countries, with a focus on those that made up the Axis powers and the Allies during World War II. As a consequence, other languages may be incorporated in the fan fiction for the sake of accuracy in characterisation, with writers drawing from their plurilingual repertoires in order to add authenticity to the characters that is likely to be appreciated by the internationally oriented audience of manga and anime. In two cases, English appeared in the summary section as well, where a brief synopsis of the story was given in English along with a specification that the fan fiction was however going to be in the L1, or that a translation into English was in process but not yet complete. While pointing out in English that a translation is underway on the summary of a L1 story might be useful in terms of drawing the attention of international readers to a story they would have otherwise skipped, it could be said that advertising a story in English when the text is actually in a different language is an unusual choice. For multilingual writers, language choice is not simply a black-andwhite issue where they decide among the languages at their disposal and adhere exclusively to it throughout the writing process. The multilingual nature of the internet and fandom, enhanced in the manga/anime category (Black 2008), fosters a variety of combinations in the use of languages, even in the presentation of the stories to their potential readers. While the majority of cases involved either the L1 or English, we have seen that other languages, especially when relevant to the source text, may appear in titles to stories written in an entirely different language. The writer does not necessarily have to be fluent in all the codes employed in the story 1

http:// hetalia.wikia.com Accessed July 20, 2016.

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presentation and the story text itself. When the language does not have an entirely communicative function, but rather aims to signal a character’s cultural or linguistic background (which may or may not be explicated in the summary or A/N) (Klimpfinger 2007), writers might have looked specifically for the expression using various resources, including asking fellow fans who speak the target language as either their L1 or LN. Where Japanese is concerned the issue is different, as most manga/anime writers are also interested in Japanese culture and language, and by educating themselves and participating in fandom activities they pick up words and expressions that may then be re-used in social interaction as well as fan fiction, where they fulfil various pragmatic and social purposes.

4.3 Reader Reviews: Feedback, Support and Constructive Criticism Receiving feedback from readers is an important element of the writing experience for fan fiction authors, as positive comments encourage their work and validate them as fully-fledged, appreciated writers in their respective fandoms. The FF.net platform has a comment/review system that allows readers to leave comments for each chapter of a given story and establish a dialogue with the authors, who may participate in the same space with comments of their own. A number of such reviews were looked at for all the un-betaed English fan fiction written by the 26 authors, regardless of whether they were included in the corpus or not.2 Almost all of the stories included in the corpus have at least one review left by a reader. A grand total of 2,008 comments was analysed, looking for specific elements that might help shed some light on how writers perceive themselves as non-native users of English in an international, super-diverse context; how they are perceived by their readers and fellow fans; and whether and how the variety of linguacultural backgrounds brought into fandom are acknowledged and negotiated in this space. For this purpose, the comments were scanned for pertinent elements, which are summarised in Table 4.1 below.

2

As already mentioned in chapter three (3.4), not all the stories written by the participating writers were included in the corpus, either because they did not belong to the manga/anime category or they were included only partially due to the 20,000 word limit set for each author.

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Table 4.1. Metalinguistic comments and switches in reader reviews Metacomments and switches (a) reader compliments language “despite” writer’s NNS status (b) reader acknowledges language “mistakes” in the texts (c) reader acknowledges other issues in writing (d) reader suggests writer gets a proofreader (e) reader states own NNS status (f) reader apologises for NNS status (g) other languages in comments (switches or entire text) * in the author’s L1 * in other languages * in Japanese

49 49 12 14 16 2 137 49 9 81

4.3.1 Peer evaluation of non-native writers In this section, the discussion will focus on points (a) to (d) of the table. First, it has to be noted that the overwhelming majority of the reader reviews examined are unquestionably positive. They vary in length, from single-word exclamations (e.g. wow!) to comments spanning several paragraphs, dissecting the story and providing suggestions and critique of characterisation and plot events. In multi-chapter stories, readers tend to leave comments expressing their enthusiasm about new chapters being uploaded, and urging the writer to release new material as soon as possible. Their interest and appreciation in the story are conveyed through linguistic and graphic choices that are typical of CMC and allow internet users to compensate for the lack of extra-linguistic cues in online writing. These include, but are not limited to: abundant use of punctuation such as exclamation points (awesome!!!!); use of caps and vowel reduplication for emphasis (e.g. you’re doing an AMAZING job!; It was an aaaammaaaaaaaaazing chappie!); verbal glosses to describe feelings and actions for both emphasis and humourous effects (*thumbs up*); emoticons to express emotions and to mark the tone of the conversation; onomatopoeic words (Kyaaaahh!!; Yay!). Positive reviews showing a distinct enthusiasm on the part of the reader constitute the significant majority; negative or partially negative reviews were also identified, albeit remarkably less frequently. They are usually formulated as constructive criticism: writers themselves often encourage readers to point out weak aspects in the stories, so that they may acknowledge them and work to improve upon them. Readers tend to provide negative feedback indirectly, taking on a non-face-threatening stance in their comments. These observations, based on the FF.net reviews analysed, are consistent with

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other studies that have explored and analysed fan fiction reviews and comments. Macklem, for instance, observes that “by and large, reviews are generally positive and encouraging, fostering a continued growth and strengthening of community,” and that “when [they] contain constructive criticism that is delivered diplomatically, they can be incentive for improvement” (2012, 214). Black similarly remarks that “most critique is prefaced by positive input and then followed by a disclaimer or mitigating statement of some sort” (2008, 111), downplaying the negative aspects and focusing instead on the positive elements of the story. Reviews where criticism is straightforward or even harsh are very rare, and in the latter case it may be considered either trolling3 or flaming (see chapter one, 1.4.2). In our study, specific attention was paid to reviews that addressed the non-native status of the writers; such comments display a diverse range of attitudes towards the issue, and vary in terms of hedging and orientation to face-saving. The majority of the 49 reviews included in point (a), addressing the speaker’s non-native status, tend to avoid any type of face-threatening attitude towards the writer, focusing instead on the positive traits of the story and writing, or complimenting the writer on their English and pointing out that the few instances of non-normative language impair neither the readability nor the enjoyability of the story (e.g. nothing major, a few small things). As writers often add disclaimers about their competence in English in their A/N, pre-emptively apologising for any instances of non-standard language in the text, it is not uncommon for reviewers to address the writer’s NNS status in response to these disclaimers. Comments emphasising and complimenting the writers’ skills in producing stories in a foreign language focus on the writer’s competence in English (e.g. your English is very good/perfect; you have such good grammar), sometimes even pointing out that they are not recognisable as non-native writers (e.g. I would have never guessed; it was a surprise; I couldn’t tell that English wasn’t your first language). Readers may also compare the author’s writing to that of other NNSs, implying that they are better than other NNS authors they have come across, or going as far as saying that the author’s English is better than that of NS writers, as shown in examples (1) and (2) below: 3

“To post a deliberately erroneous or antagonistic message on a newsgroup or similar forum with the intention of eliciting a hostile or corrective response.” OED Online. September 2013. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/206615?rskey=0nLN2O&result=3 Accessed July 20, 2016.

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Chapter Four (1) people studying English write and spell better than Americans (2) your English is a lot better than some native English speakers’ English. They wouldn’t have made the same mistakes you did, but the story’s so good that it doesn’t matter

In example (2), the reviewer still points out that the writer is recognisable as an NNS because the text included non-standard uses of language, that, according to the reader, would place the author outside the NS community. However, the reviewer still claims that, overall, the writer’s use of language is not only up to par but is better than that of NS authors, and that the quality of the story is such that those instances of non-standard language in the text do not hinder its enjoyment. Point (a), however, also includes reviews that refer to the writers’ NNS status as a setback that has been overcome, emphasising that the quality of the text, even from a linguistic point of view, is very good “for a nonnative speaker”: (3) Well done! :) for someone that speaks Spanish you have done really well!

These reviews, despite being as non-face-threatening and supportive as possible, suggest that the influence of the native speaker model is pervasive in popular thinking, even outside the ELT domain (Young and Walsh 2010; Groom 2012). Like Pilkinton-Pihko’s subjects—university lecturers in engineering—most of the writers and reviewers included in the data are not language experts, and have most probably received formal education in English in school. As a result, they are likely still influenced by the “exposure to teaching methodologies and teaching materials infused with prescriptivism and native speakerism” (Pilkinton-Pihko 2010, 60). As it is not possible to determine where all the reviewers who included these elements in their comments are from, it is similarly impossible to tell whether these reviews have been influenced by the native speakerism directed at English language learners, or if, on the other hand, they stem from a native speakers’ sense of ownership over the language (Widdowson 1994). While these attitudes appear to be still ingrained in both writers and readers, resulting in pre-emptive disclaimers and related comments in reviews, they do not hinder international fans’ creative inspiration and collaboration in the creation of fan products. The 49 reviews included in point (b) all include observations about non-standard language usage identified in the fan fiction. As with point (a), most reviews remain non-face-threatening, and the criticism is

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mitigated by highlighting the story’s strong points or downplaying the comment through mitigating expressions (I think this is still a great story!) and pre-emptive apologies (e.g. I don’t mean to be rude; I’m sorry). Point (c) suggests, in addition, that not all the issues raised by readers are necessarily related to strictly linguistic aspects such as English grammar, syntax, and phraseology, but pertain to other elements, generally punctuation, correct capitalisation, sentence length, and lack of appropriate graphical distinction between dialogue and prose. At times, reviewers take it upon themselves to point out such instances of non-normative language in the text, sometimes by quoting strings of the story in their comments and providing a correction or an alternative solution. This type of comment is often elicited by the writer who, in the A/N, encourages readers to point out instances of non-normative language in the text, allegedly for the purpose of learning and improving their writing from a linguistic perspective. Such behaviour highlights the collaborative environment of fan fiction writing, where the separation between writer and reader is not always clear-cut. Fourteen readers suggested in their reviews that writers could ask for a beta reader’s help in order to work out the language mistakes in the text or, in extreme cases, make the story even readable; reviewers address the writer’s non-nativeness directly and advise that a native speaker of English should be involved in story-editing in order to make the text more enjoyable for readers. (4) Sorry, but may I suggest getting a beta reader? … I’m guessing that English is a second language (but you’re doing an AMAZING job). ... If you want, I can be your beta reader ;)

The example above addresses points (a) and (d). The reviewer starts with a pre-emptive, non-face-threatening apology before suggesting that the writer finds a beta reader to fix the non-standard language in the text. The linguistic “mistakes” in the story have exposed the writer’s NNS status to the reader, who, however, remarks in a parenthetical comment that the writer is doing a very good job with the story—that is, for a NNS. As a last remark, the reader offers to act as a beta reader for the writer. What we can infer from reviews like this is the strong sense of mutual participation that infuses fan fiction writing as well as other fandom practices. While raising issues with the writer’s use of language, the reader also offers a solution. However, while this attitude suggests again that NN writers are accepted as legitimate and appreciated authors in fandom, their status still sets them apart from native writers and might result in well-meaning but patronising attitudes. Other reviews included non-face-threatening

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comments implying that the amount and type of non-normative language used in the stories disrupt the flow of the narrative, impairing readability and, as a consequence, the enjoyment of the story, as in the review below: (5) I’m sorry, but I couldn’t finish the fic. There were so many grammatical and usage errors … it would’ve been really good if it weren’t for [these]. So I guess … beta this, and it’ll be good.

The reviewer in example (5) still mitigates the negative critique of the writer’s language by stating that the story was good under other aspects. However, other reviews were strongly negative, employing such adjectives as aggravating alongside expressions such as I can’t understand anything. These comments are usually few and far between, even if a higher ratio of comments calling for a beta reader for help was noticed in certain stories. However, the small number of reviews addressing both the writers’ NNS status and the presence of non-normative language in the stories suggests that, for the most part, readers appear to prioritise content over form, even in the realm of ELF fan fiction. What appears to be important to the readers is the meaning expressed through language, and linguistic accuracy might take a backseat to an engaging plot and good characterisation. While it was not included in the investigated points, the dialogue between writers and readers went beyond the issues discussed above: in addition to all the enthusiastic one-line comments, readers may offer help and advice to writers as to how to complete and improve their work, often solicited by the writers themselves. The latter may even incorporate these suggestions in the text: tips on characterisation and plot, or requests for sequels or specific stories coming from readers who are not only passive reviewers but active participants, if only tangentially, in the process of fan fiction writing. In websites such as FF.net which foster interaction and networking among writers, as well as between writers and readers, fan fiction writing may also take on a certain collective aspect, where the audience plays an active role. This is achieved as the readers give advice in terms of plot and characterisation, support one particular plotline in multi-chaptered fan fiction, or act as impromptu proofreaders, as seen above. The writer may or may not take the reader’s comments and suggestions into consideration, but the direct communication between writer and reader places fan fiction well within the domain of participatory culture.

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4.3.2 Plurilingualism in Reviews As Vettorel (2014) observed in her blog data, non-nativeness may be used as a common element to foster social contact and affinity with the interlocutor. In the realm of fan fiction, reviewers might point out, in response to disclaimers in the A/Ns, that they are also NNSs and that they share the same difficulties and “frustrations,” and encounter the same issues when writing in English. Reviewers “understand [the writer’s] pain,” as one commenter worded it. In point (e), 16 instances were identified in the reviews of readers revealing their status as NNSs to the writers, and at times their country of origin. In the latter case, reviewers may reveal their nationality, not only as a display of solidarity towards a fellow non-native fan but to express their affiliation with the setting of the story. As can be seen from point (f), only two instances of NNSs actually apologising for their “poor” English were identified. While the fan fiction examined was all in English, reviews occasionally included instances of code-switching phenomena as well as reviews written entirely in a language different from English. As point (g) in Table 4.1 in 4.3 shows, 137 reviews included at least one non-English segment, subdivided between reviews in the author’s L1, in Japanese, and in other languages. These uses of multiple languages may fulfil several of the functions associated with code-switching phenomena identified by Gumperz (1982) and recently reworked by Klimpfinger (2007, 2009) in relation to ELF. These functions may overlap and coexist in one instance of code-switching. Signalling culture, as suggested by Klimpfinger (2007), is probably the most common function fulfilled by switches in reviews. Reviewers may switch into a different language to signal their own culture to the writer through a positive exclamation (wunderbar; très bien) or an interjection, such as greetings and closing formulae (Salut!, au revoir). When the reader’s L1 coincides with the writer’s L1, or when the reader has some knowledge of the writer’s L1 as an LN, the switch may be longer. Readers seem to not only project their identities through marked linguistic choices but signal affiliation and solidarity with the writer, with whom they may share the same linguacultural background: (6) Hello! Merci pour ton update …

In example (6), the reader, who like the writer is French, opens the review in English but then continues in French, interspersed with English words and phrases (please update soon!). Here, signalling culture goes hand in hand with a second function; that is, specifying an addressee. While,

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generally, all reviews on FF.net are directed to the writers, the choice to use another language limits access to the text to other French speakers. In example (7) below, the reader speaks French as an LN and leaves a review that is partly in French. (7) I love reading these drabbles! … Je parle un peu du Francais … Perdonne-moi si mon francais n’est pas tres bon.

She engages in alternational code-switching, presumably so as to display solidarity towards the writer and address her individually in her L1. Solidarity towards the writer’s linguacultural background may be marked through code-switching even if the reviewer is not fluent in the writer’s L1, as in example (8): (8) is “well done” in Spanish bien hecho? If it is, bien hecho!

The latter instance of code-switching is in line with Jørgensen’s observation that, in polylingual languaging, as well as linguistic heteroglossic practices, “bits and pieces” of a language are used for the achievement of pragmatic and social aims (2008, 168). These switches specifically fulfil social rather than pragmatic functions, as they mean to highlight shared linguacultural elements with the writer and create affinity with the interlocutor. Positive exclamations, such as those listed above—e.g. wunderbar, très bien, bien hecho—may also be ascribed to the function of reiteration as theorised by Gumperz. In these switches, the same message is conveyed in two languages for clarification, amplification, and emphasis (1982, 78). The two latter elements appear appropriate for this context, where reviewers express their appreciation in English first, then highlighting it with the switch. Japanese, as the language of manga/anime, also appears in the reviews. It is, however, most likely an LN for both writers and reviewers. With 81 instances in the reviews analysed, it was predictably the most frequently used language in the comments. One of the most popular words appearing in the comments is kawaii, meaning “cute” in Japanese, which constitutes a positive adjective in the evaluation of the stories by the reviewers. Such items may be ascribed to the reiteration function, as they are usually preceded or followed by positive comments in English. Another common Japanese item in reviews is the word onegai, meaning “please”; it is frequently used as an exclamation by reviewers urging the writer to either update the story or write a sequel. Onegai is the informal version of onegai shimasu, which also appears in the reviews, as

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in “update onegai-shimasu!” The informal conversational closings ja ne, and its more formal correspondent ja mata, often appearing at the end of the reviews, are, respectively, the equivalent of “bye” and “see you later.” In this context, the expressions might imply that the reviewer will be back to comment on the following chapter of the story. Other Japanese items that occur in the reviews include the exhortation ganbatte—“good luck!” or “do your best!” in relation to either story writing or other events in the writer’s real life, most likely school or university. Japanese interjections appearing in source manga texts were also identified in comments, namely wah and the stronger kyaaa-, each appearing with varying numbers of As, both used as exclamations expressing positive feelings in relation to the story posted or events occurring in the story. It has to be noted, however, that all the instances of Japanese encountered in the reviews were Romanized; that is, written in the Latin alphabet. This may suggest that knowledge of Japanese is limited for many fans who cannot navigate the Japanese writing system comfortably, and Romanization of such common words such as those illustrated above facilitates comprehension for newer fans and those who cannot read Japanese script. Technological constraints may also have influenced the use of the Latin alphabet in the typing of Japanese words, as inserting hiragana is not immediate on non-Japanese keyboards and the process can be time consuming, resulting in writers opting for a faster solution. Such uses of Japanese in reviews have the function of signalling the status of the reviewer as a fellow manga/anime fan (Black 2008, 108) and creating social affinity with the writer by highlighting participation in the same fandom community. As Cogo points out, plurilingual repertoires also “serve as signs of solidarity and relationship building” (2012b, 293). In addition to the common words and interjections described above, Japanese terms that define genres of manga/anime, such as those introduced in chapter three (3.2.2) and untranslatable words such as food and drink related vocabulary (ramen, sushi, sake, etc.), are also used in reference to the Japanese culture in which the writers’ stories are embedded. These switches may thus also be conceived as symbolic uses of the languages. In her study on multilingual advertising, Kelly-Holmes (2005) studies the marketing effects of using multiple languages in advertising, especially where the languages employed are extraneous to the speech community to which they are targeted. What she stresses is the symbolic function of the foreign language elements in multilingual advertising: “the switch between codes is used primarily to create a communicative effect— for paralinguistic purposes—rather than to bring across referential meaning” (11). In addition, she remarks that “it is used for effect or form

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rather than information or content” (ibid.). These statements partially overlap with the use of language that writers and readers make in the paratext, as they insert for the most part recognisable “bits and pieces” of other languages (Jørgensen 2008, 168) and “token Japanese phrases” (Black 2009a, 414) that clarify and emphasise the message rather than provide additional content. As Kelly-Holmes states, the “symbolic nature” of the embedded linguistic element “takes precedence over its referential or informative nature” (2005, 21). However, while the symbolic use of language has a marketing goal in Kelly-Holmes’ study, here the symbolic aspect of code-switching exists alongside a social function. Indeed, the choice to use a language other than the agreed working language is deliberate and aimed at fulfilling a social function for creating an additional link between writer and reader in accordance with the cosmopolitan character of fandom. The fans’ sociolinguistic repertoire is not used purely for communicative reasons, but also and especially in heterogeneous and international contexts such as the one under examination, for social reasons. Indeed, other languages appear pre-eminently as formulaic expressions, i.e. the greetings or closing expressions seen above, that do not require a specific degree of fluency in the language to understand at least the gist of the message.

4.4 ELF Users as Successful Fan Fiction Writers It was seen that, despite writers being NNSs of English and using nonconventional language in their stories, the reviews they received are overwhelmingly positive and supportive as well as numerous, especially for multi-chaptered stories. In their role as fan fiction writers, NNSs are not learners of texts produced for evaluation in school or formal educational contexts, where they systematically fail to measure up to the native speaker model. They produce texts for the consumption and enjoyment of an international audience that, while evaluating writers on a linguistic level, often offers positive and supportive comments, minimising non-standard uses of the language. Rather, readers tend to be more critical of the content, following the characterising feature of ELF where content is more essential than form in international communication. This also leads us back to the concept introduced in chapter one, where fandom was described as an environment where minorities with no access to mainstream power sources can express their voices and propose alternative readings to the official ones in terms of content and topics discussed. This quality of fandom can be extended to include language, as Lam (2000) points out in relation to ESL students engaging in online practices:

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“students develop strategies of articulation that question dominant discourses and power relations and produce alternative visions of reality” (Lam 2000, 478). Similarly, ELF speakers may have the same chance of being appreciated as fan fiction writers like NSs without the risk of being shunned or encountering phenomena of gatekeeping. Cultural and linguistic diversity, as well as the use of plurilingual repertoires, is not only accepted by readers, but may be exploited to fulfil pragmatic and social functions in the communication between writers and readers. What may be considered a hindrance in official contexts and an immediate sign that a speaker is an outsider to the Native English-speaking community may become an additional asset in fandom and fan fiction writing (Black 2006, 2008). Cosmopolitanism is valued in international fandom and by fans who are eager to be immersed in a global, international environment, and especially so in the domain of manga/anime where the culture of reference is located outside the Anglo realm and more generally Western mainstream values. Indeed, in Black’s words, “members of [FF.net] seem to display a global disposition in that they value and express interest in learning about the different cultural and linguistic backgrounds” of other fans (2008, 78). In fandom, therefore, NNSs as ELF users can cultivate their identity as successful writers of fan fiction in English, appreciated and encouraged by their audience regardless of their linguacultural background and use of non-conventional English forms in their stories. Black, in her 2008 study on young immigrants to the USA, shows effectively how “popular cultural and technology [converge] to provide a context” where they are “able to develop a powerful transcultural identity that is discursively constructed through the different cultural perspectives and literacies that … fans across the globe bring to this space” (76). Lam (2000) also investigated the construction of an L2 identity for ESL speakers through CMC,4 where the L2 identity was built on “written correspondence with a transnational group of peers on the Internet via a home page on the World Wide Web and synchronous and asynchronous communication” (464). However, both studies focused specifically on immigrant youth in the United States; such a framework to the study has very different implications to the ELF context, as it entails, for the participants in her research, immersion and integration within the AngloAmerican linguacultural community where they need to function in their real lives. By writing on FF.net and exploiting their knowledge of Asian 4

However, her research did not focus on fan fiction writing; it was still related to fandom, as her subject had created a website dedicated to a Japanese pop singer.

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history and languages, Black’s young writers can start to find their voices as respected and appreciated writers in fandom, regardless of their nonnative status, because of their multicultural and multilingual skills. As a result, they become more confident in their use of English as they operate in Anglo linguistic and cultural contexts (Black 2008; Lam 2000, 2004; 2006). The writers included in my corpus do not have to face such challenges, as they have no need to immerse themselves in AngloAmerican culture: their use of English is an instrument for international communication and the expression and sharing of a common interest in a cross-cultural environment. Still, publishing fan fiction in English online allows them to construct and project an identity of writers in English, appreciated by a readership of like-minded people who value whatever contribution their plurilingual and sociocultural repertoires may bring into the collaborative environment of fandom. Indeed, with fan fiction, “writers can be confident that the general topic of their writing will be known and of interest to the audience” (Black 2005a), and, as shown in the reviews, the tendency for readers is to focus on their reading pleasure in terms of plot and characterisation and generally overlook uses of non-normative language unless readability is severely hindered. Diversity and heterogeneity in fan fiction writers also contribute to the ongoing construction and shaping of the readers’ own sociocultural repertoires (Blommaert 2008), that they will in turn use and exploit in relevant contexts both inside and outside fandom.

4.5 Writer-reader Dialogue The previous sections have contributed to describing the corpus of fan fiction that constitutes the source of data, introducing the writers with their diverse linguacultural backgrounds and fluid identities even within fandom itself: how they perceive their non-nativeness; how their readers react to their disclaimers and non-normative English forms; and how they incorporate their sociocultural and linguistic repertoires in their headers and the reviews. As seen, on FF.net the fan fiction experience does not include an active writer and a passive reader, but, in accordance with the participatory and collaborative nature of fandom practices, dialogicity is established on multiple levels: fan fiction writing per se is a “dialogic” form of writing (Black 2009a, 421). As Herzog (2012) reiterates, “fan fiction writing as a whole is a communal and dialogic effort, with numerous fans and stories having a share in producing the fan text.” A dialogue is then established between authors and readers by means of A/Ns, reviews, and comments on the stories. This element is especially

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important in multi-chapter stories, where the communication is ongoing throughout the entire process of writing and updating the fan fiction, and it permeates the entire fan fiction writing experience. Suggestions in terms of plot and language are given by readers, alongside critique and encouragement, which the writer may take into consideration during the writing process. The importance of such writer-reader dialogue has been highlighted by Black since her early work on fan fiction: “the dynamic interaction between author and reader helps the writer develop a strong sense of audience and practice revision through fashioning and refashioning texts to address input from the audience.” In addition, “the immediate feedback provides writers with a good reason to keep writing, as they receive encouragement and support from an audience that is eagerly awaiting the next chapter of their story” (Black 2005a). Communication outside the target text, between writers and their readers, despite occurring predominantly among strangers, appears to be informal and to conform to characteristics of asynchronous online communication: both A/Ns and reviews/comments tend to incorporate linguistic and semiotic elements typical of CMC, such as emoticons, verbal glosses,5 and other orthographic strategies aiming at substituting extra-linguistic cues lacking in online written communication (see chapter two; Crystal 2003; Baym 2010; Lee and Barton 2013). In addition, writers tend to address their reviewers personally in their A/Ns: they often employ informal conversation openers, either in English, Japanese, or other languages, with popular choices being either Hello or Konnichiwa, as well as closing formulae asking directly for reviews, such as: please review!, constructive criticism is welcome, and reviews are love!. Other types of closing expressions, such as until the next chapter!, reinforce the dialogic element of fan fiction writing, assimilating every posting of a chapter to an encounter with the reader. This suggests that writers wish to establish a direct relationship with their readers. This relationship is then reinforced by the reviewers themselves, who exploit their sociolinguistic repertoires to mark their status of insiders in the community and build affinity with the writers, fostering social relationships in a practice that is not generally associated with a high degree of interaction. This tendency is not limited to NNS writers and their readers, but is one of the essential elements of fan fiction writing within a participatory environment. As Macklem words it: Author’s Notes are a way for the author to engage the reader and encourage the reader to take an active interest and role in the story, 5

Verbal glosses are usually signalled by asterisks and are used to express feelings and actions (e.g. *is tired* or *wipes sweat from forehead*).

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Fan fiction is therefore well situated within fandom as a popular practice for fans to engage in, as it allows them to propose alternative readings of the official texts, questioning mainstream views with alternative suggestions that emerge through fan talk, and sometimes giving voice to characters and topics that are downplayed or ignored in the original text. International fandom, with English as its working language, allows international fans to exploit their linguistic and sociocultural repertoires in the stories, creating a cosmopolitan climate where such cross-cultural elements are not only accepted, but appreciated. Analysis of the paratext (profile pages; fan fiction headers; A/Ns; reviews) of the stories allowed preliminary insights into the use of multiple languages alongside English in accordance with the global and heterogeneous nature of fandom, and especially of the manga and anime domain. In addition, perceptions of the writers’ own ability to produce stories in English were explored alongside readers’ reactions, as recorded in the stories’ review section, highlighting the importance of reader support and peer reviewing within a strongly collaborative and participatory context. This environment, deeply dialogic and intertextual, allows the writers to construct identities for themselves as successful writers of manga- and anime-inspired stories, where they may include elements from other languages and cultures that will be appreciated and appropriated by the readers, free from the constraints that see NNSs of English as perennially deficient users of the language.

4.6 Metalinguistic Awareness, Translation, and Flagging The analysis of the paratextual elements of fan fiction analysed above shows that both writers and readers are conscious of the super-diverse environments and practices that they are engaging in and the variety of linguacultural backgrounds people bring into fandom. They deliberately exploit their plurilingual resources in order to signal their linguacultural identity within the international fandom, as well as build social rapport with other fans: that is, either to show affiliation with the same linguacultural background or express solidarity and camaraderie by making use of the interlocutor’s L1. Membership of the same fan community is expressed in the paratext through the use of Japanese words and expressions in author profile pages, fan fiction headers, and reader reviews.

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Consciousness of linguacultural diversity characterises fandom as a whole, and the Japanese comic and animation fandom in particular; this consciousness is reflected in the stories, as the writers themselves appear to possess a heightened awareness of their own linguistic practices in their fan fiction. Therefore, a discussion of metalinguistic awareness and flagging of code-switching phenomena is included in this chapter. The analysis below will attempt to show how active participants in global communities negotiate the simultaneous presence of multiple linuguacultural elements in their writings with the necessity for providing a readable and enjoyable story to their readers. The issue of intelligibility of the switches was also raised in relation to the data identified in the corpus. While writers definitely do not avoid engaging in plurilingual practices, they appear to be conscious of potential miscommunication—or, in the narrative context, miscomprehension of the events unravelling on the part of the reader—caused by the use of non-English elements unfamiliar to the readers. In an ELF context such as fandom, with many linguacultural backgrounds and sociolinguistic repertoires involved within the communities, it is not possible to rely on a stable, shared linguistic repository. For this reason, writers may decide to raise attention of the code-switching elements through flagging or provide translations of the non-English items in the stories so as to guarantee that readers have easy access to the switched elements.

4.6.1 Metalinguistic awareness Metalinguistic awareness is most visible in fan fiction that spans several countries and/or has an international cast. The multilingual elements found in these stories show awareness of linguistic diversity on the part of the authors, who directly address the issue of communicating via a shared common language. In one of the stories, the main characters are a Corsican woman, who speaks French as her L1, and a Japanese girl. They leave mainland France, where they live, and move across multiple countries during their adventures. The author of the story, a Polish L1 speaker living in Germany, shows linguistic awareness in her description of the characters’ travels and interactions with the locals, underlining the necessity for a common language of communication and the importance of mutual intelligibility. Language also comes into play in the development of the plot, as the main characters are two undercover assassins and it is essential for them that their real identities not be discovered.

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(9) she had prepared a number of stories, made up the night before … The nun was clearly happy to refresh her French, which was very good indeed. —You have a special accent, dear, what part of France you’re from? —Umm … I was born in Corsica—she replied honestly, as there were no reasons to hide her origins. Her accent was obvious.

In example (9) the French character, Mireille, is undercover in a monastery abroad, and French is clearly stated as the language of communication between Mireille and the nun. The language of the fan fiction is English, but the writer is quick to point out, as the characters meet, that while the dialogue is written in English the interaction should be assumed to be carried out in French. Mireille is also asked which part of France she comes from, and she decides to answer truthfully, as her accent betrays her Corsican origins. In this segment, the character’s accent becomes an important aspect in the narration as a problematising element, as it could give away her real identity. (10) Even them, who didn’t speak French or English … explained their names in Polish. And laughed when the woman tried to repeat after them. “Pyethrushka”—she uttered and then clapped happily.

In the example above, the relationship between the French character and her Polish hosts is negotiated despite the lack of a common language. The character is described as trying to communicate with the nuns by learning and reproducing their names in a language that is unfamiliar to her. Her effort at producing Polish is reproduced in the written text by employing a non-standard orthography of the name Petruška that would match the character’s phonemic output. The same expedient is used in another story, where the Russian name Ivan is given an alternative spelling when pronounced by a Chinese character to provide an orthographic representation that accounts for the character’s L1 accent in the production of Russian sounds: (11)

You should eat, Yiwan.

The form Yiwan is used exclusively in direct dialogues produced by the Chinese Yao to visually represent his accented pronunciation of the name Ivan. The writers thus effectively compensate for the lack of acoustic cues in the written text by graphically reproducing the character’s accent, which is not an uncommon practice in creative writing and at the same time gives a distinct voice to the characters. This is highlighted especially in the second example, where the non-standard spelling occurs multiple times in

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the character’s daily interaction with Ivan, and it becomes a recognisable trait of Yao’s language. Non-standard spelling of this type, defined as phonetic spelling by Androutsopoulos, is not uncommon in CMC alongside other types of non-conventional spelling (2000: 521–2; see also Hinnenkamp 2008; Tsiplakou 2009), and it is reported in ELF bloggers as well (Vettorel 2012, 2014). Use of non-standard spelling is generally deliberate and aims at achieving a specific effect. In this case, it aims at expressing the characters’ effort in producing sounds in unfamiliar languages and marking the distinctiveness of their accents in direct dialogues. The Russian character in the story, in turn, speaks English with a Russian accent, as readers are reminded on three different occasions in the text: (12) “You’re okay?” His thick accent could not be missed. (13)

[H]e asked him with an English that was thick with Russian accent, “Are you fine?”

(14)

“You don’t like it?” The Russian’s thick accent couldn’t hide his disappointment.

The metalinguistic comments incorporated in the narration show again that the writers are linguistically aware of the necessity of a common shared language in fictional universes that have an international cast of characters. It is here established that English is used as a lingua franca among characters, and that the young Russian, compared to the Chinese and Italian characters, has a stronger accent, as is repeatedly noted by the writer. Plurilingual practices within the stories themselves are not necessarily marked through a language switch in either direct speech or narrative prose, but they still show characters negotiating communication in a lingua franca, providing realism and accuracy to the fan fiction. At the same time, such practices may fulfil narrative purposes, as in example (9) above.

4.6.2 Flagging of code-switching Flagging of switches may occur in a variety of ways, such as pausing, hesitation, repetition, or a commentary (Poplack and Sankoff 1984); in written texts, the lack of prosodic and other extra-linguistic cues entails that the flagging of code-switching has to occur in a different way. The use of italics to mark a word that does not belong to the primary language of

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the text is an established convention in written language; however, in CMC a variety of options are employed by users, also according to the mode they are engaging with. In addition to italics, language may be flagged using boldface, capital letters, graphic symbols such as inverted commas or asterisks, or even a different colour than the main text. In the corpus, 26 instances of graphically flagged switched items were identified. There is, however, no consistency in this type of flagging, as the majority of items were not marked graphically at all. Italics was used with 21 items (e.g. hen hao; miso soup; kamishimo), 3 items were signalled with inverted commas (“hitlerjugend”; “senpai”; “hentai horde”), and bold (Jekenhou, Hakke Rokujuu Yonshǀ) was used to mark the remaining two items. The use of graphic markers in the stories appeared to fulfil other functions more frequently, such as compensating for a lack of extra-linguistic cues in direct speech, or, in the case of italics, to signal flashbacks. Although graphic flagging of switches was not common in the corpus, it was not the only method authors used to draw attention to the perceived markedness of non-English items embedded in the stories. As Japanese is often thought of as the default language of the characters in manga and anime, its use is generally not flagged by authors within the narration. Japanese elements may be flagged graphically or translated, as will be seen. In Noir and Hetalia fan fiction, however, switches are marked on a double level, as they represent both the author’s conscious choice to introduce a different element into the base language and the characters’ conscious choice to use their L1 or an LN, as they are assumed to be speaking in a lingua franca—English or French—when they communicate with one another. (15) Just go to an Italian restaurant and it’ll be a notte perfetta! Yao didn’t comment at the usage of Italian the woman just done, and whispered …

The example above shows both graphic flagging of the Italian expression as well as an ulterior acknowledgment of the marked language in the following narrative segment. The use of other languages in Hetalia fan fiction highlights the linguacultural identity of the characters, and, in this context, reinforces the link between the woman’s suggestion of an Italian restaurant for a romantic date and the outcome of the evening. A comparable example may be found in a crossover story where a character from a Japanese-based fictional universe encounters sentient horse-like beings from a fantasy, Western cartoon.

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(16) “Are you a Kirin?” He asked, bewildered and shocked. “I’m afraid I don’t know what kind of creature that is, I am princess Skylight …” “So you’re not a Kirin, I was scared there for a second.” He says relived that he did not have to face such a powerful creature …

Here, the two characters negotiate meaning and identity as the Japanese character, meeting such unfamiliar creatures for the first time, associates them with a mythological creature from his own cultural background. His interlocutor answers negatively and introduces herself as the ruler of the fictional universe, and in his reply the Japanese mitigates his previous direct request by explaining the reason for his reaction. The presence of a Japanese noun pertaining to traditional mythology, in this case, triggers an instance of cross-cultural meaning negotiation within the conversation as the characters try to find a common point of understanding.

4.6.3 Translation The flagging of switches may also occur through translations embedded in the text. The switched item is thus directly acknowledged as a marked language choice by the writer, who provides a translation for readers. Translations in the corpus were identified in a number of contexts: in brackets or dashes within the text, so that the translation of the nonEnglish elements is immediately accessible by the reader; a second option, especially in Hetalia/Noir fan fiction, is to provide translations in the A/Ns either at the beginning or the end of a specific chapter, so as to not disrupt the flow of the narration. In this second context, as will be seen, writers may add personal information or elaborate on specific aspects of the story. The third option identified in the corpus entails employing the translation of a non-English item, or a paraphrase of it, within the story so that a clarification of the meaning of a specific item is provided without signalling it explicitly as a translation. Ten instances were identified in the corpus where translations were added immediately after the switch in the text, either between brackets or dashes: all these instances relate to switches into Japanese and involve both standard Japanese elements and fictional Japanese-sounding elements related to manga, as in the following examples: (17) [H]e’d been pinned down by some blonde Kunoichi (woman, maybe?) (18) He wore his school uniform, and wielded a katana—Japanese traditional sword

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In example (17), the author means to provide a translation of the Japanese kunoichi (female ninja), but as she is not confident about her knowledge of the word she hedges her statement with an adverb followed by a question mark, as if asking readers for confirmation directly. However, it may be possible that the added question might have been a self-comment by the author herself as a reminder to do additional research that went unnoticed—and as a result, unedited—upon publication. The following examples show two further instances of immediate translation in the text; the first relates to standard Japanese, while the second refers to a fictional combat technique found in the original text. It has to be noticed that in example (19) the translation provided corresponds to the English adaptation of the name of the technique, so that readers would still have to be familiar with the text of reference in order to have a full comprehension of the narration. Translations included in A/Ns at the beginning or end of a given story/chapter were mostly found in relation to Hetalia and Noir fan fiction, as the translations of the switched items are often accompanied by additional information about the countries personified by the Hetalia characters or the settings in Noir fan fiction, as well as additional metacomments about the languages used in the stories: (20) (a) “Hallo” means “hello” in German. I wanted to add more but … I’m too shy to use German … (b) I see now that I wrote “ja” instead of “yes.” It means yes in German … (c) I lived in Hungary for a bit … “Szia” means “hello” in Hungarian. … The word “Magyar” means Hungarian.

The example above shows excerpts from a number of A/Ns found at the end of chapters of the same story: here, the author decides not to embed translations in the text, but explains her linguistic choices in detailed notes at the end of chapters to guide the reader through specific elements in the story that may not be familiar to everyone. Indeed, while a degree of knowledge of basic Japanese words and traditions may be expected from fellow manga fans, and may not require direct explanations on the writer’s part, other linguistic, historical, and cultural elements may be obscure to the majority of readers. Example (20a) includes the translation of a word in addition to metalinguistic comments about the use of German; the author states in the A/N that while she lived in a German-speaking country

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at the time this story was written and she would have liked to use more of the language in the story, she felt self-conscious about doing so. This suggests that while English is still perceived as a foreign language to the writer, as testified by her request in the A/N to point out any mistakes to help her improve her English (if there is mistakes, point them out and help me to improve my English), its use is still considered the default choice as a language of international communication and an integrating aspect of her fandom experience, whereas German is not. The second example simply reiterates the writer’s attention to translating switches for readers who may not be familiar with even very basic German, while in the last example she provides a translation of the few Hungarian words she uses in another chapter of her story. Additional elements are given about her own life experience (I lived in Hungary), which clarifies the connection between a writer’s own life and its projection within the story, which is one of the main characteristics of the fandom and fan fiction experience (Fiske 1992; Jenkins 1992a; Becque 2012; Coker 2012). The writer also adds geographical and historical information about the countries represented by the characters in the stories, guiding the readers’ interpretation of the stories by drawing parallels between the relationships between characters and historical international relations among the actual countries. The example below, while it does not provide a direct translation as it mentions a toponym, elaborates on the writer’s choice and provides the readers with additional elements to better understand the background of the story and the reasons for the underlying narrative choices. (21) For non-Polish readers: CzĊstochowa is a city known for Catholic influence.

In example (22) below, the metacomment itself constitutes a very inspiring element for the fan fiction, which is anticipated in the A/N at the beginning of the story. (22) many other authors mentioned that Lovino6 means “I ruin” … I wanted to write about that.

6

Lovino is usually transliterated as RovƯno Varugasu from Japanese script, which justifies the assonance with the Italian verb “rovinare”—to ruin. http://hetalia.kitawiki.net/index.php?title=South_Italy Accessed July 20, 2016.

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The connection between the character’s name and the Italian verb rovinare has been made by other writers; when such conventions spread in a specific fandom, they may become recognised as fanon. As will be explored later in more detail, the relation between the character’s name and the Italian verb will be at the base of this introspective story, where the metalinguistic element is very prominent. The third identified category of translations includes those instances where the translation of the switched element is not marked explicitly as such. It is instead provided within the narration itself, without interrupting the flow of the story. This type of translation may be associated with Gumperz’ functional framework in relation to the function of reiteration (1982, 78). Reiteration entails the repetition of the same message in the two languages, often with some degree of variation, for clarification or emphasis. In this context, the reiteration, in English, of the same message expressed by the switch may fulfil a clarification function within the narration. Readers who may not be familiar with the meaning of the switches employed in the text are provided with an immediate paraphrase into English. (23) “[O]mae o korosǀ” snarled the boy, but his friend didn’t care—he knew this saying which meant something like “I’ll kill you.”

In the example above, the character produces his signature line in Japanese as a threat to his friend. In the narrative segment, the writer provides a paraphrase of the expression into English, which the addressee does not worry about as he knows it to be an empty threat. In the following example, while the Japanese expression is not translated directly, the choice of verb in the narrative segment paraphrases the switch: (24) “Oh, gomen.” Hiro apologized as he knelt over him. “It was my fault.” (I’m sorry, jp).

The use of “apologized” in the dialogue tag effectively conveys the same sentiment expressed by Hiro in Japanese; it is thus not necessary for the reader to be familiar with the Japanese expression gomen—an abbreviation of gomen nasai—to understand the meaning of the exchange. As in example (21), while we did not count toponyms or given names as switches, they sometimes required additional explanation in order for their role within the narration to be understood by readers. In a Noir fan fiction set partly in Tibet, the author described the geographical setting and the underlying religious elements to familiarise the readers with the

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notions necessary to follow the plot of the story, as well as additional historical information about the history of the region: (25) It was said that Palden Lhamo, the female guardian spirit of the sacred lake Lhamo La-tso (known as Oracle Lake) … Mount Zhidag on the north, as the legendary “white” residence of Bonpo, protector of the Earth; Mount Shridevi on the south, the “blue” residence of Palden Lhamo, Protectress of Water; and Mount Begtse, the “red” mountain residence of Fire Protector Begtse.

In the last example, the translation underlying a Japanese given name is provided by the writer to give her readers the means to understand the dialogue between her characters, as reported below: (26) “Shiroitori-san, aren’t you eating?” The girl asked … “I’m not a bird, my name is Hirohito. And you’re … Kazue-chan, right? It’s nice to meet you,” said Hirohito—his name was not the “Shiroitori,” meaning “White Bird.”

In the exchange above, Kazue addresses the second character, Hirohito, by the wrong name. He answers that he is “not a bird” and gives her his true name. At the end of the character’s line, the narrative segment elaborates on the comment, clarifying that the name Shiroitori translates to “white bird” in Japanese. This additional information, provided by the writer, would allow all readers to access the joke in the passage. All the examples described above are limited in frequency in the corpus—flagging and translation occur in the corpus but do not constitute a tendency among the writers analysed here, who tend to leave the switches unflagged in the text and assume that the readers would be able to access all the non-English elements in their stories. Something worth noting is that flagging and translations were more frequent in reference to stories that included multiple languages, rather than texts in which only switches into Japanese were involved. It may be possible that a heightened attention to the readers may be related to a perceived lack of familiarity with languages other than Japanese. A certain knowledge of basic Japanese is almost taken for granted within the manga and anime fandom, entailing that a variety of frequently-used nouns, expressions, and exclamations have become part of the community’s shared sociolinguistic repertoire and do not require additional explanation. On the other hand, writers may not assume as easily that all their readers are familiar with the non-English linguistic elements—albeit basic—of other languages they are using and the linguacultural elements associated to them. As a consequence, it makes sense that it would be more likely for writers to

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include additional information and translations when embedding in the base language elements from other linguacultural backgrounds that are not considered by fandom members to be shared by the majority of the participants to the community. This tendency will emerge in relation to other aspects relating to code-switching in the next chapter. In addition, writers may deliberately flag or translate switches that they deem particularly significant in the context of their stories so as to respectively highlight the switch in the text and ensure that its semantic meaning is accessible to readers. The analysis of the paratext illustrated here offered preliminary insights into the use of multiple languages alongside English in accordance with the global and heterogeneous nature of fandom, and especially of the manga and anime domain. In addition, perceptions of the writers’ own ability in producing stories in English were explored alongside readers’ reactions, as recorded in the stories’ review section; this highlights the importance of reader support and peer-reviewing within a strongly collaborative and participatory context. The linguistic and pragmatic choices in reader reviews contribute to describing fandom as a participatory and supportive environment, where critique is always mitigated and the focus is shifted on the strong element of the author’s production. This environment, deeply dialogic and intertextual, allows the writers to construct identities for themselves as successful writers of manga and anime-inspired stories. Identity construction for both writers and readers in an international fan fiction context involves the use of elements from other languages and cultures. These may include their own or others, where they aim to show affiliation with a specific linguaculture for social purposes: addressing and building rapport with a specific person or group, or signalling their membership of the manga and anime fandom. Constantly negotiating and building mutual solidarity and social rapport, as well as reinforcing community membership, is important to fans. As part of their online experience, they engage with multiple communities of practice within the imagined community of fandom. As an imagined community, fandom may be defined as amorphous, an abstract notion that exists on its members’ ideas of affinity with like-minded people. These people group in small communities that self-regulate but are still recognisable as contingent emanations of the abstract idea of fandom (see chapter two, 2.6). It is impossible to describe all fans under a single set of rules as each community creates its own idioms of practices, which may partly overlap with other communities, and suggests that the structure of fandom may be conceived as that of a rhizome, where all the contingent concretisations of fan communities are part of an interconnected network of multiplicities

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and may not be brought back to a single starting point. As a result, a supportive attitude and expression of solidarity are important aspects of the fan experience, as they, moving from one bulb of the rhizome to the other, negotiate and build social relations through the use of both a specific register and items from other languages. These might constitute a common element to anchor their experience as cosmopolitan users in a super-diverse, ever-changing environment. The following chapter will focus in more detail on the analysis of the stories; the presence of plurilingual elements in the stories will be investigated according to selected categories, and observations will be made in relation to their role and functions in the texts.

CHAPTER FIVE CODE-SWITCHING AND FAN FICTION

5.1 Corpus Analysis: Categories and Frequencies The previous chapter provided preliminary information on the writers involved in the creation of the corpus by studying the paratext to their stories. The exploitation of plurilingual resources in the paratext was analysed mainly in terms of identity and social relationship construction. Writers present themselves and their work on their author page and in fan fiction headers, projecting elements of themselves that convey their linguacultural background and their membership of multiple interest-based fan groups. In addition, they maintain an ongoing dialogue with their readers, who respond to the writers’ work through reviews and comments written in the dedicated section. Plurilingual resources are similarly employed by readers to foster affinity and solidarity with the writers, both by using the writers’ L1 and by adding Japanese elements to their review, to indicate their own affiliation with the manga and anime community and foster social rapport with the writer. Heteroglossic practices were identified in the fan fiction texts as well, where the social and symbolic aspects exist alongside other functions in the stories, that is, pragmatic and narrative, as will be seen. The complex and multi-faceted character of fandom as a whole, and of manga and anime fandom in particular, is mirrored in the vast variety of source texts and remixing practices that resulted in a variegated and diverse sample of fan fiction in the corpus. Similarly, it was found that plurilingual practices in the chapter occurred through multiple, different phenomena, according to the aims of the writer and the stories, in consonance with the fluidity and contingency of ELF communication. Careful manual scanning of the corpus revealed that, in the 248,464 words of fan fiction text, 1,377 instances of code-switching phenomena were identified, which is roughly equivalent to 55.5 instances per 10,000 words. These items were then classified for analysis according to a number of criteria. A main distinction was made between items that are encoded in their respective languages and fictional, non-English words and phrases

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that belong to the manga category. This subgroup includes instances of languages that are neither English nor encoded in any actual language, but are instead fictional Japanese elements: Japanese-sounding words that exist exclusively in original texts and that may relate to a number of different semantic fields; that is, martial arts or the supernatural, as well as toponyms, names, and character nicknames. These items were categorised in a separate class as their use depends more on the knowledge of the source text and in-group linguistic practices than the other plurilingual practices identified. However, as will be seen, using Japanese fictional terms rather than their English adaptations suggests a desire to stay true to the original text when there is an opportunity to do so. In addition to the manga-related category, the instances of codeswitching in the corpus were categorised into a number of sub-groups: x Insertional code-switching: this category includes a majority of single -word instances of code-switching, usually nouns, alongside a few noun phrases and verbs, embedded within the base language. These switches are often related to the traditions of a specific culture, and they are for the most part untranslatable into English. Three subcategories are distinctively recognisable: food and drink, martial arts, and religion and mythology x Interjections: this category is constituted by pragmatic elements represented in direct speech in the stories, including greetings and closing formulae, exclamations, and discourse markers x Honorifics and terms of address (Japanese): the Japanese language has a complex system of honorific speech, of which base elements appear in the texts under examination. A variety of personal suffixes that are employed when addressing or referring to other people vary according to the age and the sex of both speaker and addressee, as well as the relationship between the two. Except for a very small number of instances (Monsieur, fratello, sorella), items in this category are exclusively drawn from the Japanese language. A small number of intersentential or intrasentential instances of codeswitching involving longer strings of language were also identified in the corpus, as well as song lyrics in languages other than English that have specific narrative functions in the stories. These few instances were grouped in the category of longer strings and lyrics. In addition to these main categories, switches were also grouped according to language, and for each switch type it was investigated whether it was listed in either of the two adopted reference dictionaries—

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the online edition of the Oxford English Dictionary and the user-created Urban Dictionary—or whether it was a hybrid form. The latter are words in languages other than English occurring in the stories that have undergone a process of hybridisation with English, by which the nonEnglish stem of the new form is joined to an English lexical or grammatical element. All findings for these categories may be summarised in the table below. Table 5.1. Data frequencies broken down by category Category

Types

Tokens

Single-word

72

362

Longer strings and lyrics

8

8

Interjections

32

63

Honorific suffixes

10

620

Terms of address

12

128

Manga/anime

42

196

Total

176

1377

4

4

Hybrid forms Presence in dictionaries * OED

41

* UD

95

As may be seen from the type/token ratios for each category, with the exception of longer strings and lyrics, the tendency for writers is to employ a small number of items, which are then repeated multiple times throughout the text. Certain items appear in relation to specific source texts, such as the culinary Japanese term ramen (buckwheat noodles), which occurs in the corpus 50 times due to its frequency in the original text, the manga Naruto. It is possible to draw detailed information about linguistic choices in related fan fiction by consulting fan-maintained websites and wikis1 as well as discussion forums, where certain uses of 1

See cited websites at the end of this volume.

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Japanese and other languages within the fan fiction texts may be contextualised and clarified. Quite predictably, the majority of codeswitching instances involved Japanese, as shown in the table below, which breaks data down by language. Table 5.2 Data frequencies and percentages broken down by language Language

Types

%

Tokens

%

Japanese

132

75.0%

1296

94.1%

Italian

16

9.1%

44

3.2%

French

5

2.8%

6

0.4%

German

9

5.1%

9

0.7%

Tibetan

1

0.6%

2

0.1%

Russian

2

1.1%

9

0.7%

Chinese

1

0.6%

1

0.1%

Hungarian

3

1.7%

3

0.2%

Polish

3

1.7%

3

0.2%

Danish

2

1.1%

2

0.1%

Portuguese

1

0.6%

1

0.1%

Spanish

1

0.6%

1

0.1%

176

100.0%

1377

100.0%

Total

While Japanese was involved in 132 of the identified instances, the remaining 48 were distributed among other 11 languages, namely: Italian, French, German, Tibetan, Chinese, Russian, Polish, Hungarian, and—with a slight penchant—Italian. The number of types translates into 1,377 instances of code-switching in the texts, once again with a strong preference for Japanese, which makes up the 94.1% of the instances. In line with Klimpfinger’s findings (2007; 2009), the great majority of code-switching instances in the corpus involve “single words, viz. filler and functions words, nouns and adjectives, but also place names and terms for special cultural concepts (Klimpfinger 2009: 359). Japanese is the most frequent language chosen for code-switching in the corpus due to the origins of the source material: all but three writers included instances of Japanese in their work. On the other hand, only four authors included

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languages other than Japanese in their stories; there seems to be a correlation between lack—or very few instances—of Japanese and the significant presence of other languages in the texts. A variety of languages (Italian, French, German, Polish, and Tibetan) were represented in a story that had no Japanese in it, and, similarly, use of other languages (namely Italian, Russian, and Chinese) corresponded with fewer instances of Japanese in works by the other two authors. This correlation is not casual, as these stories were inspired by texts which are not set in Japan and that involve an international set of characters (e.g. Noir, Hetalia). Some of the types identified only occurred once in the corpus, while others were more popular, as will be seen in detail in the following sections. Due to the frequency of Japanese items, two experts in the language were consulted during the analysis process, and an online Japanese-English dictionary, Denshi Jisho,2 was adopted as a reference.

5.2 Codification in Dictionaries A choice was made to crosscheck all lexical items and pragmatic formulae/interjections against the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) in order to identify how many of such items are recognised and integrated in the English language. A second crosscheck was run against the online dictionary, Urban Dictionary3 (UD). UD is a user-based dictionary—that is, any internet user can add a new entry, or provide alternative definitions for existing entries—whose validity is then evaluated by other users. Readers of a given definition may click on a thumb up icon to express their approval or a thumb down icon to signal the definition as unsuitable (Smith 2011: 45): “Urban Dictionary promotes itself as a democratic, descriptive dictionary authored by the people for the people” (ibid.). As a user-made dictionary, UD may be criticised in terms of reliability and accuracy in the definition of the entries, as they often do not follow basic lexicographic criteria and may be deliberately sarcastic or misleading. However, the collaborative and collective nature of its creation and development, along with the immediacy with which it can be updated, make the database always up to date with the latest additions to internet slang, as well as other items pertaining to specific registers and offline and online communities. This would be the case with Japanese words from the manga and anime universe that have seeped into the language use of nonJapanese fans in fandom-related contexts. The main difference, in this 2 3

http://www.jisho.org./ Accessed July 20, 2016. http://www.urbandictionary.com/ Accessed July 20, 2016

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case, between integration in the OED and presence in UD, is that an integrated item has been present in the language for a significant amount of time and is likely to be recognised by the majority of non-fans, whereas an item that is only present in the UD may have only a restricted use that is directly linked to the manga/anime fandom, if not to fans of a specific manga or anime text. Eighty-one of the items (including pragmatic formulae and phrases) identified in the corpus, that is, all items except the manga category, were crosschecked against both dictionaries: out of those, 26 were included as entries in the OED and 66 were found in UD. Except for two items, kirin4 and kotatsu,5 all the items present in the OED were also present in UD. In three cases, however, the definitions provided by the OED did not match the connotations of the items as they were used in the texts; this may be due to processes of semantic variation or restriction that foreign words may undergo when they are adopted into another language (Weinreich 1953: 54–5). An example of this is dǀjǀ, which in the OED definition is described as “a room or hall in which judo is practised,”6 whereas in Japanese it is used in a more general sense, where it indicates any hall used for the purpose of martial arts training. A parallel example with another martial arts-related word is kata, which the OED definition once again associates exclusively to judo, but in the original Japanese it is actually defined as the “standard form of a movement, posture, etc. in martial arts, sport, etc.,”7 showing again an instance of semantic restriction. The word has an invariable plural form, as in Japanese, but an occurrence in the corpus was identified bearing the pluralising suffix -s. Another example of semantic restriction is constituted by the noun hentai. The OED lists the term as meaning “sexually explicit or pornographic manga and anime, often of an extreme or outlandish nature,”8 and so a manga/anime genre. The original meaning of the term, which is now used as a genre name for this type of material, is actually “pervert,”9 and this is the meaning with which it is used in the corpus, as in the example below: 4

A mythological animal resembling a unicorn. A table with an built-in heating system set over a quilt so that the heat is retained under the table. 6 “dojo, n.,” OED Online, September 2013. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/56545?redirectedFrom=dojo. 7 http://www.jisho.org/words?jap=kata&eng=&dict=edict&romaji=on. 8 “hentai, n.,” OED Online. September 2013. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/291048?redirectedFrom=hentai 9 http://www.jisho.org/words?jap=hentai&eng=&dict=edict&romaji=on. Accessed July 20, 2016 5

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(1) “Hurry up, hentai, or we’ll be late!” (pervert, jp)

The word hentai also appears in the corpus in the hybrid form “hentai horde,” a fan-created term that is related to a specific manga. While fanon elements are very common in fan fiction, it is not common to see metalanguage used in the text proper rather than the paratext, where it would be frequent and expected. In a Ranma 1/2 fan fiction,10 an in-text reference is made by one of the characters to the “hentai horde” (meaning horde of perverts). The horde is a group of boys who challenge the beautiful and martial arts-savvy character Akane every day at school: only the boy able to defeat her in battle will be allowed to date her. This reference was used in the fan fiction, extending the creative name of the recurring event from fan talk into the media text, highlighting the intertextuality of the fan fiction practices. This use may be justified for reasons of language economy: in fan fiction, writing is geared towards fandom insiders who are likely to be familiar not only with distinctive fictional vocabulary pertaining to the original texts, as will be seen, but also the fan-created terminology that they use in discussing the material. Use of an expression assumed to be known by other Ranma 1/2 fans would avoid using a long paraphrase. “Hentai horde” also constitutes an example of how Japanese may contribute to the creation of new hybrid lexemes in English in otaku communities, and how the interest in Japanese language and culture overrides the Western connotation of the word. A second search that involved only the fictional vocabulary pertaining to the original manga/anime texts was run on UD only, as Japanese fictional words would not be likely to be incorporated in the Oxford English Dictionary. Out of 39 items, 26 were related to the manga Naruto, which was one of the most popular source texts in the corpus. Eleven items were listed in UD, and all of them were related to this manga. The popularity of Naruto in the corpus is reflected in the UD where, however, it is not always positive; some of the definitions for these entries give a very negative connotation to the fans of the manga/anime. This highlights the user-made characteristic of the dictionary, which fosters the publication of “popular and divergent” (Cotter and Damaso 2007, 1) interpretations of meaning. The presence of manga-related fictional items in UD suggests the popularity of some of the original texts within the community and is consistent with the role of UD as a dictionary made for people by people, who “collaborate, cooperate, and compete for meaningmaking” (ibid., 19). Items are included that are part of the fictional 10

http://ranma.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page Accessed July 20, 2016

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universes some of these users engage with, both as aficionados and detractors, highlighting the intertextual and multimodal character of fandom and its communities. As a user-made, open platform, UD also fits within the rhizome framework introduced in chapter two, specifically in relation to the principle of cartography. UD can be theorised as a map “open and connectable in all of its dimensions” that is “reworked by an individual, group, or social formation” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 12) and lacks reconnection to a hierarchically superior unity.

5.3 Linguistic Hybridity A number of instances were found in the corpus of hybrid forms containing both English and Japanese elements, albeit rarely. Nonstandard or creative forms of this type are probably more likely to occur in interest-based fan groupings at a higher interactional level (Vettorel 2014), where negotiation of meaning and the development of in-group language foster the emergence of new, creative forms that mix the current language of communication and the language of the source texts. This is the case of the word “hentai horde,” that, as we have seen, is translatable as “pervert horde”; this expression is used in fan talk to refer to a specific recurring event in the manga Ranma 1/2, as explained in the section above, and it occurs once in the corpus in a fan fiction inspired by that source text. An instance of mixed compounding is megane-boy. Megane is the Japanese term for glasses, but it is also used to refer to any person— especially males—wearing prescription glasses. This use in the corpus is associated with a specific character in the manga Prince of Tennis, where the term is used in relation to the multiple characters wearing glasses. A soundtrack CD for the anime was released; its Japanese title, Megane Seven, suggests that the use of the word in the fan fiction was inspired by its occurrence in the original text. In addition, megane is used in fan talk as a generic term for boys who wear glasses—the term for girls is meganekko—with groups and communities dedicated to the appreciation of bespectacled manga/anime characters. The word megane can be used to refer to a person with glasses, but the compound form—also as separate words—is also found in manga-related groups. Other instances of Japanese-English mixing found in the corpus involved either the derivation or compounding of two elements belonging to the two languages. The derived mixed form is an instance of suffixation related to the use of Japanese personal suffixes with an English noun: (2) “Hiro Tanaka-kun and Hiro Tanaka’s sister-san …”

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Here, the Japanese personal suffix -san is attached to the English noun sister, creating a hybrid form rather than using the Japanese honorific, (o)nƝsan (older sister). The writer probably did not have access to this honorific, but did not renounce to use the appropriate form of social deixis in the dialogue. The use of the honorific signals both the speaker’s familiarity with Hiro, through use of the informal suffix -kun, and a less intimate relationship with his sister, who is referred to with -san. The creation of this hybrid form may have the specific function of compensating for a Japanese item the writer did not have in her linguistic repertoire, and a mixed derivational form expresses both the notion of sister and the speaker-addressee relationship that is an essential element in Japanese communication. One instance of deliberately creative hybridisation, for the purpose of creating a pun, was also identified in the corpus. (3) Sasuke: “You’re not making sense! Just because you have been without ramen for what, one hour? You’re deramendrated!” Great, Sasuke. Last year you couldn’t even put two words together … and now you’re creating new ones! … Naruto: “That’s not even a real word!”

The wordplay is based on a creative manipulation of the word “dehydrated,” altered so that the water element is purged from the word to be substituted by ramen, a Japanese dish consisting of wheat noodles in broth topped with a variety of ingredients. In the story, based on the manga Naruto, the character Sasuke complains of Naruto’s attitude and blames it on his craving for ramen. In this conversation Naruto, who is particularly fond of ramen to the point of being addicted, cannot even think straight when his stomach is not full of the traditional dish. His taste for ramen is acknowledged in the original text and it is often exploited in the stories as an element of humour and comic relief, as in this case where the Japanese name of the dish has been embedded in an English word to create a hyperbolical exclamation. The non-standard, creative quality of the nonce item is acknowledged and flagged in the text itself, as Naruto retorts that this interlocutor is using made-up language to win his argument, and Sasuke himself muses about his communicative abilities. This hybridisation instance exploits both languages to create a new word with a humorous effect that both plays on a popular trope of the original text and builds on the social dynamics between the characters.

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5.3.1 English-only creativity Even non-standard, English-only nonce formations, which are widely attested in ELF communication (Seidlhofer 2011; Pitzl 2012; Pitzl et al. 2008; Mauranen 2012), are not common in ELF fan fiction: without the time constraints of spoken and highly interactional CMC, writers might have referred to dictionaries rather than creativity to fill lexical gaps in their vocabulary. In addition to hybrid formations and neologisms emerging from cross-language influence (Hülmbauer 2007; 2009; 2013a), traditional word-formation processes come into play in the coining of new, English-only forms. The coinage of new words may “express ideas that are unavailable in the standardized repertory of meanings” (Gerrig and Gibbs 1988: 3), as well as express communicative effect and intent according to the needs of the conversation and its participants. While these processes are traditionally recognised and well attested, the exploitation of non-standard forms for successful meaning-making has been closely looked at in ELF in relation to the notion, proposed by Widdowson, of virtual language. This is defined as the “resource for meaning making immanent in the language which simply has not hitherto been encoded and so is not, so to speak, given official recognition” (Widdowson 1997: 138, 2003). ELF users may exploit the potentialities of this virtual language, expanding it through the creation of grammatically sound words—via attested and productive wordformation processes (Bauer 1983)—that are not, however, encoded in the language from which they stem. Three instances of creativity related to word-formation processes were identified in the corpus: the nouns matingship, blackhead, and respond. (4) After he kicked out Hitomi and broke their matingship (I don’t think that’s a word. XD)

Matingship has been created through a derivational process, with the suffix -ship attached to the noun “mating” to indicate “the state of being mates” of two characters in a story inspired by the manga Inuyasha. As the main characters are anthropomorphised dog demons, the romantic bonds between them are referred to as matings, and significant others as mates. For lack of an appropriate, pre-existing word to express the notion of a binding relationship between the two characters—comparable to a marriage—the author exploited the virtual language and coined a new noun by means of the word-formation process of derivation. The writer is perfectly aware of having created a new, non-standard English form, as she adds a parenthetical, in-text A/N in which she flags the form as a non-

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standard creation. Flagging “appears to occur when the speaker has some cognizance of the unidiomatic ‘marked’ quality of their speech production” (Firth 2009, 140); in the story, the narration is interrupted to give space to the voice of the author, who is aware of the non-standard characteristic of her language and signals it to her audience by means of an embedded note. The author signals the non-standard form and mitigates her statement with the “XD” emoticon, denoting amusement. By these means, she shows her audience that she is aware that she has produced an unusual form and employed it deliberately, possibly as a pre-emptive strategy to avoid receiving comments by readers relating to her choice. The example below shows an instance of analogic compounding in word-formation: (5) [S]troking the blackhead softly …

Here, it appears that the compound “blackhead,” formed by the adjective “black” plus the noun “head,” is created in analogy with the existing form, “redhead,” and is used in the story to indicate a person with dark hair, in lieu of the English standard form “brunet” or “brunette.” The compounded noun “blackhead” already exists in English, with the meaning of “a lesion of the skin commonly occurring in acne vulgaris.”11 However, due to the lack of relation between the existing meaning of blackhead and that of the new form, and the semantic relation with the form redhead, it might be said that this compound form has been created by the author independently of its English standard meaning, and through analogy with an existing term in the same semantic field. This is similarly an example of exploitation of the virtual language. Due to the lack of flagging, it is not possible to say whether the author is aware of the non-standard nature of the form employed. The last example involves the category of class conversion, an accepted and attested process of word-formation. (6) What would be the best respond?

Here, the verb “respond” is turned through class conversion into a noun, and is used in lieu of the standard English form “response,” as the characters ponder how to react to another character’s words. In this last

11

“blackhead, n.2 and adj.,” OED Online. December 2013. Oxford University Press, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/19726?rskey=TWiiEP&result=2&isAdvan ced=false.

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case, it is likely that class conversion occurred to fill a lexical gap in the author’s vocabulary rather than a gap in the language. The exploitation of the potential of the virtual language, alongside the creation of Japanese-English hybrids, is very limited in the corpus: this may be due to the written, edited nature of the practice of fan fiction writing. As the writers may have access to resources, such as dictionaries and thesauri, a lexical gap in the vocabulary may easily be filled by consulting one of these tools. Where hybrid forms are concerned, it may be noted that word-formation processes and analogical formations involving both languages were similarly not very common, presumably for the same reason. In addition to unusual hybrid creations, such as the fan talk-related “hentai horde,” the playful “deramendrated,” the clarifying “megane-boy,” and the gap-filling “sister-san,” or Japanese-English forms and collocations already existing in the English language, such as the collocations “pork-ramen,” “ramen shop,” and “miso soup,” were also identified in the corpus. The morphological assimilation of Japanese items into the base language will be analysed in a later section.

5.4 Insertional Code-switching Table 5.2 (above) shows that with 72 types, the category of insertional code-switching involving non-English words or noun phrases was the most diverse in the corpus. These switches are all single nouns or premodified nouns, except for one Italian verb (rovinare), and are not easily regrouped as they vary significantly semantically: items may include locations (Hungarian puszta, Italian caverna), names of fictional or real groups or associations (German hitlerjugend), and so on. However, three main semantic subgroups have emerged, with items recurring throughout the corpus: (1) cuisine (16 types) (2) martial arts (8 types) (3) supernatural/mythology/religion (7 types) A fourth category includes all non-English items pertaining to semantic fields other than those above. The choice to group a number of elements in categories 1 to 3 was due to the high frequency of nouns in these semantic fields. These frequencies may be easily explained for all three main categories above: vocabulary pertaining to food and drinks is predictably drawn from the background cultures represented in the texts. As for the other two

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categories, the frequency of this type of vocabulary, usually nouns, is once again due to the popularity of texts that have underlying combat and supernatural themes as inspiration for fan fiction. The cuisine category is the most variegated one, with 16 different types, 95 tokens, and three languages represented: Japanese, Italian, and Polish. Japanese items are once again the most frequent, with ramen (wheat-based noodles) as the most frequent culinary item in the corpus with 50 occurrences. As anticipated, ramen is the favourite food of the title character in the popular manga Naruto, which acted as the inspiration source for several of the stories in the corpus. Naruto’s obsession for ramen is reflected in fan fiction, especially for humorous effect, which explains the high frequency of this item. Out of the 16 items, 13 were encoded in the OED, and would probably be easily recognisable by an international public due to the proliferation of restaurants specialising in national and regional cuisines. Pasta, gnocchi, and cappuccino are recognisable elements of Italian cuisine, alongside the Japanese sake, soba, and miso, which are common staples on restaurant menus. The presence of Italian is always related to Hetalia fan fiction: the eight instances of the word are either pronounced by or in relation to an Italian character, as in examples (7) and (8): (7) I heard a crash from the kitchen; Italy was cooking (probably pasta) there. (8) I can make perfect pasta …

Italy’s addiction to pasta in the stories reflects the original texts, as with Naruto and his love for ramen. The international value of Italian cuisine is instead highlighted in the Noir fan fiction, where cappuccino and tiramisù are ordered in a French café. The Polish borscht (beetroot soup) occurs in the same story. While the latter is probably not as immediately recognisable as the ones above, it is still encoded in the OED. The three items not listed in the OED are all Japanese: dango,12 melon-pan,13 and okonomiyaki.14 12

Sweet dumplings made with glutinous rice flour (Hosoi 2012, 7). “[M]elon bread (sweet baked good with a bread-dough interior and a cookiedough crust with ridges resembling a muskmelon),” http://www.jisho.org/words ?jap=melonpan&eng=&dict=edict Accessed July 20, 2016. 14 “[S]avoury pancake with various ingredients,” http://www.jisho.org/words?jap =%E3%81%8A%E3%81%93%E3%81%AE&eng=&dict=edict&romaji=on. Accessed July 20, 2016. 13

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The category of martial arts predictably includes only Japanese items, mostly weapons (e.g. katana, shuriken, and kunai) and titles (e.g. shinobi, kunoichi, and ninja), related to the practice of ninja techniques. Out of the eight types identified, five (dǀjǀ, kata, katana, shuriken, and ninja) were listed in the OED. These elements probably entered the English language through popular culture representations of ninjas as well as vocabulary related to the practice of martial arts (specifically dǀjǀ and kata, which may be unfamiliar outside circles of practitioners of Japanese martial arts). One interesting note to make within this category regards the choice between the items ninja and shinobi to denote the same referent. Both items bear the same meaning and result from different readings of the same kanji (logographic Chinese character integrated into the Japanese writing system), but while shinobi is the most common reading in Japan, ninja has been adopted into the English language. Shinobi appeared to be used more frequently, as 35 instances were identified in the texts, whereas ninja had 21 occurrences. Shinobi also appears in collocation with other Japanese items, such as onmyǀji shinobi (specialists in magic and divination) and baka shinobi!, that is “stupid/idiot ninja” where a character is reprimanded by a fellow ninja for not taking care of his wounds properly. Language choice, in this instance, suggests that despite the coexistence of a preferred Japanese term and a preferred English term, the Japanese word is favoured by writers. A crosscheck suggests that this is the case for dǀjǀ and katana as well. While the Japanese word dǀjǀ is always employed in relation to martial arts practice, the English gym never occurs in this context, and it is used, on the other hand, to describe places where other forms of physical training take place. Occurrences for katana (27) and “sword” (19) also appear to confirm this tendency, as the English “sword” is also used in relation to Western-style swords and, in the example below, as an explicit translation of the Japanese katana: (9) He … wielded a katana—a Japanese traditional sword …

As seen in the previous chapter (4.6.3), the author here provides an explicit parenthetical definition of the Japanese element in an attempt to clarify her vocabulary choice and make it intelligible to the reader who may not be familiar with the word. The third category, constituted by switches relating to mythology, religion, and the supernatural, is, out of the three, the one that requires a deeper knowledge of the background cultures from where these linguistic forms stem. The seven items identified in the corpus are drawn from Japanese (six items) and Tibetan (one item). The Tibetan item occurred in the same Noir story mentioned above, as one of the characters arrives in

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Tibet. Toponyms and the proper names of specific deities referring to the local practice of Buddhism are mentioned in the story, but they are not included as switches; the only one included as a switch was lama, describing a Buddhist priest. This term is included in the OED. As for Japanese, most references are made to mythological beings pertaining to Japanese culture (e.g. kirin, yǀkai, and ayakashi) that are often intertwined with the fantasy elements in the original texts. The remaining switches include 51 items in different languages (Japanese, Italian, German, Danish, and Polish) that did not fit in either of the three main categories described above. Again, the majority of elements are Japanese, ranging from traditional clothing (kimono, obi, and kamishimo), games and hobbies (origami and shǀgi), occupations (miko and buchǀ), criminality (yakuza), traditional architecture and interior design (shǀji and kotatsu), and descriptors (kawaii and chibi) that contribute to shaping the geographical and cultural setting of the story, as well as signal the character’s identities. (10) [H]ow does it look, chibi?

In the example above, the Japanese chibi, indicating a small person, appears to be employed as a taunting nickname towards a character that is younger and physically weaker than the speaker. In this example, the writer uses her knowledge of Japanese to mark the dialogue and signal the characters as speakers of Japanese. (11) The stamp came from China, but the message was in Japanese … written in kanji. Come to me, we’ll never be apart.

The message is written by the Japanese character to her lover on a postcard from overseas. The use of the Japanese script not only marks the character as ethnically and linguistically Japanese, but also alerts the other character as to whom the secret message is from, fulfilling a narrative function, in addition to signalling linguacultural background and personal identity to a second character. The frequent use of switches into different languages contributes to setting the stories in specific geographical and sociocultural backgrounds by including culture-specific elements, as in the example below: (12) Small flowers decorated the kimono and a blue obi completed the outfit.

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The character here is described as wearing traditional Japanese clothing (kimono) with a matching belt (obi) in the occasion of a festival, which places the character in a specific cultural setting. In the example below, characters are described engaging in a board game while drinking an alcoholic beverage, both typical of Japan. (13) [T]he men were still playing shǀgi and drinking sake.

The elements, as inserted in the text above, both set the characters within a Japanese context and highlight their familiarity with local traditions. Many of the items described in this chapter may be defined as “token” uses of the language (Black 2009a, 414), which have a symbolic element to them, as anticipated in chapter four (4.3.2). The symbolic element is significant in the code-switching practices analysed here, as switches have the function of signalling the culture of the characters in the stories and the geographical location they are set in; this is done through the use of vocabulary or pragmatic elements that are either easily understandable for the readers or not relevant from the point of view of the content. However, as has been revealed, switches also fulfil pragmatic, social, and narrative functions. In Kelly-Holmes’s advertisements, “a word or phrase from the language associated with the country of origin reinforces both the visual and/or aural texture of the advertisement” (2005, 36), which is consistent with the use that is made of foreign elements—especially Japanese—in the stories under investigation. In our context, however, languages are not conceived as marketing tools, which prevents us from considering KellyHolmes’ notion of language fetishism as applicable to this corpus. The fans’ use of foreign elements may still be defined as symbolic to the extent that they act as an authenticity device in the stories, contributing to immersing the reader in the geographical and cultural setting of the fiction. Unless the writer makes a deliberate choice to change the setting of the source text, as occurs in AUs for example, switches employed as authenticity devices draw linguistic links between the fan fiction and the original material. This suggests that writers, while proposing alternative readings for these texts in their work, also show a certain degree of loyalty towards the source text. Indeed, one of the most appreciated elements of a good fan fiction is its plausibility; good stories read like they could be canon. However, the underlying reasons for engaging in code-switching go beyond the symbolic aspect of the switch as a linguistic marker of the culture of reference. As they engage in such language uses, writers—and readers—not only add detail and accuracy to their creative writing, but position themselves as knowledgeable members of the fan community.

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Switches in the narrative may also be employed to reinforce a character’s linguacultural background, especially in stories with an international cast of characters. In example (11) above, the mention of kanji situates Kirika as a speaker of Japanese. In an AU story set in England, the Japanese character signals his cultural background by switching and complaining about lack of Japanese food in the house: (14) “Tsch, you didn’t cook soba,” he complained … Izzie frowned and placed a wide plate of chicken on the table. “We had soba three days ago.”

However, characters may signal their own linguacultural identity, or another character’s, by switching into other languages within direct dialogue: they may use their L1 to refer to themselves (e.g. Italia (Italy); Magyar (Hungarian) in Hetalia stories) or to others (I have to tell sorella [sister]). An LN may also be used to refer to others: in “that strict Deutsch,” the character uses German as an LN to refer to a German character; the association of the German Deutsch with the adjective “strict” may reinforce the stereotypical trait of the character. Entire stories may be based around a single switched element. It is the case of the only verb in this category, the Italian rovinare (to ruin); “rovino” is the first person singular of the present tense of the verb, which corresponds to the katakanization—that is, the adaptation of foreign names and words to Japanese script and phonetics—of the character’s given name, Lovino. (15) It’s unfair to have a name that literally means “I ruin.” I destroy, I break, I … rovino.

The underlying meaning of his name triggers self-introspection in the character, who muses about his life and his shortcomings first, and then finds solace in the thought of his relationship with another character. The single or pre-modified nouns in this category occur frequently in the text and may fulfil different functions from a narrative point of view, as they contextualise both the setting of the story and the characters. The setting of a story or a character’s culture may also be signalled by means of switches into the characters’ L1(s) or other LN(s) within direct dialogue: in example (14), the character signals his cultural background by asking for Japanese food in the United Kingdom. L1 switches serve the function of signalling a character’s linguacultural background, in most cases Japanese: as the chosen language of communication is English,

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single-item switches allow writers to mark the characters as speakers of a specific language (example 10: chibi), even within an ELF context. The higher frequency of single-word switches compared to longer segments or alternational code-switches in ELF may be due to the necessity of maintaining intelligibility within the ELF communicative contexts. Fan fiction readers have different competence levels in Japanese and other languages that may appear in the texts; as a result, including clauses or entire sentences in a language that is not English within a text addressing an ELF audience may hinder the readability and enjoyment of a specific story for readers who may not be able to decipher switches. While translations and paraphrases in the text may be useful for guiding readers through the switches in the stories, the tendency highlighted in the corpus is for writers to use single-item elements that might be easily recognisable for fans who consume both fan fiction and the original texts. However, it is not always the case, as some stories may be addressed to a specific small group of readers on a linguistic basis. For example, Leppänen’s fan fiction writer alternated between Finnish and English in such a fashion that it was impossible to determine which, if any, was the primary language of the story (2008). This “systematic code alternation” involved different discourse functions being fulfilled by the two languages (ibid., 163): the narrative segments, from the Finnish girl’s perspective, are written in informal Finnish, while dialogues between the American character and the girl are in informal American English. This authorial choice, however, significantly restricts readership, as only fluent speakers of both Finnish and English would be able to access the text in its entirety. In ELF contexts, such as the one under investigation, where the choice to write in English is generally oriented towards sharing fan fiction with a wider international audience, the choice to include one-word switches in the text rather than longer sentences may not be related exclusively to the author’s actual fluency in the switched language—which is usually very basic—as much as to the necessity for the story to be accessible to international readers. In Klimpfinger’s words, “as English is the only common means of communication for the speakers, each switch also includes a certain risk of misunderstanding and/or possibly excludes other speakers, even more so when the switch is a longer passage” (2009, 359). The same may be said for fan fiction: while manga/anime fans may be expected to have a certain familiarity with Japanese words and cultural aspects that they pick up from both the original texts and by engaging in interaction with other fans, not all of them may be able to access texts that include long strings of Japanese or other languages. The incidence of such single-word items as the most frequent choice in terms of switches in the

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corpus may be, in light of the observations above, related to the notion of imagined audience, that is, “the mental conceptualization of the people with whom we are communicating” (Litt 2012, 331). Audience is important to writers, as readers validate their creative work—and more so in the fan fiction universe, where the separation between the two roles is paper thin. As was seen in chapter four, reader reviews and comments may even influence the development of the plot or character relationships, as suggestions are incorporated into the text. In this context, it may be postulated that the intended recipients of fan fiction, such as those found in the corpus, are fans with a good grasp of English and a certain degree of familiarity with basic Japanese words and pragmatic formulae that pertain to daily life or to specific themes and elements of the source text. Single-word items appear to be the most variegated category of codeswitching occurring in the corpus, as it is the largest in terms of types. Indeed, it includes a variety of languages related to different topics in the text. They appear in both narrative segments and direct dialogues. In both contexts, these items are often used where no direct translation into English is available (e.g. dango and shǀgi) or where the item used is already an established loan in English (e.g. cappuccino and tiramisu), marking a distinct origin rooted in a different linguacultural context. This is the case for many of the items in the three categories of cuisine, martial arts, and mythology/religion described above. Indeed, even where an English alternative is available the Japanese option tends to be favoured, as seen above in the vocabulary choice between ninja (itself a loanword, but deeply integrated into the English language) and shinobi, as well as between the Japanese inu and the English “dog,” which will be analysed in section 5.8 below. The frequent use of switches into different languages contributes to setting the stories in specific geographical and sociocultural backgrounds by including culturespecific elements. The main function identified in relation to this type of switch is that of signalling culture, as theorised by Gumperz (1982) and later identified in ELF discourse by Klimpfinger (2007, 2009). In light of the examples analysed in this section, however, it has been established that multiple nuances are identifiable within this main label. The symbolic element of code-switching as an authenticity device is an underlying theme in the data that separates the written, literary background of this corpus from the investigation of spoken interactions proposed by Gumperz and Klimpfinger. Another distinctive element is provided by the mediated nature of the texts: writers speak through their narrators’ and characters’ mouths, and the choice to include switches—and what type of switch—is

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influenced by the imagined idea the writer has for the intended recipients of their work. The setting of the story itself affects not only how code-switching is used but also how it is perceived: uses of Japanese in fan fiction taking place in Japan have the primary function of authenticity device, showing loyalty and adherence to the linguistic conventions of the source text and, on a subtler level, to position the writer as an expert of the source text in its original form. On the other hand, in stories set outside Japan or portraying international characters, switches still have the role of adding to the ambiance of the story. In addition, they also act as linguistic markers of culture for the characters, not only in relation to the reader but also in terms of negotiating the character’s identity and social relationships with other characters within the fiction.

5.4.1. Morphological integration It was highlighted earlier how hybrid forms mixing English and another language appeared to be very rare in the corpus: low frequencies were also noticed in relation to morphological integration of the inserted items in the English language. For the great majority of the data analysed, the languages remain mostly morphologically distinct, as insertional lone items usually appear as unmarked forms or inflected according to the embedded language morphology, as in the Italian example below (as seen in section 4.6.2): (16) Just take him to an Italian restaurant; it’ll be a notte perfetta! [perfect night, it.; emphasis in original]

The Italian character switches to her L1 as she assures her interlocutor that he would spend a perfect night if he took his date to an Italian restaurant. Both word order, with the noun notte followed by the adjective perfetta, and morphological inflection—feminine, singular—comply with the grammatical rules of Italian. The majority of Japanese items are embedded in English as unmarked (zero) forms; however, eight nouns show some degree of integration into English morphology, as their use in plural contexts occurred both in uninflected forms and with the English pluralising suffix -s. Japanese itself has no plural inflection, so, within a code-switching paradigm (Budzhak-Jones and Poplack 1997), the zero plural in English would still express plurality in the contributing language. An issue in the analysis of single-word items, such as those described above in code-switching studies, concerns the distinction between borrowings and switches: “single ‘other language’ items inserted in an

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utterance may range from being a fully integrated borrowing” to being perceived as not belonging to the primary language of communication (Stammers and Deuchar 2012, 630). However, no definite criteria have so far been established to decide “when a lexical item from one language, used during discourse in another language, whether by a single speaker, or repeatedly in a community, should be considered a loanword” and when it may constitute a switch (Poplack and Sankoff 1984, 99). A number of different criteria have been proposed to distinguish borrowings and switches. Poplack and Sankoff (1984, 103–4) put forward both linguistic and usagebased criteria: frequency of use; native-language synonym displacement; morphophonemic and/or syntactic integration; and acceptability. Not all these criteria, however, need to be fulfilled at the same time, nor are they unequivocal signs of a word’s status as a borrowing. The borrowing versus code-switching issue, however, presents itself with increased complexity in ELF, as in this context it is not possible to assimilate the manga/anime fans to a stable bilingual community. We are dealing with a multi-layered community of interest and practice made up by international users bringing with them a variety of linguacultural backgrounds, as well as sociolinguistic repertoires built over the years. ELF speakers make use of their full linguistic repertoires in order to achieve specific communicative—or, as we might say in this case, narrative—goals in their texts, and it would be impossible to discern how a foreign word embedded in an English sentence may be perceived by an ELF user either producing or receiving the sentence, as that may depend on their individual history and vocabulary. An individual ELF user participating in fan fiction practices may have acquired a specific nonEnglish word in a variety of ways: as part of their L1(s) in childhood (e.g. Polish) or as an LN (e.g. German, Italian); as borrowings through their L1(s) or English (which may be the case for food and drink items, such as cappuccino, pasta, and ramen), or any other linguistic source involving heteroglossic practices and plurilingual elements. Especially where Japanese is concerned, watching subtitled anime and engaging in fan talk and creative practices may foster the acquisition of LN forms, which are then reproduced to fulfil the users’ communicative, social, and narrative purposes in the production of linguistically heteroglossic text. It would therefore be inappropriate to attempt to operate a distinction between borrowings and switches in such an ELF context; indeed, Klimpfinger’s (2007; 2009) more flexible view of code-switching in ELF was adopted, which includes a number of plurilingual phenomena. In his theorisation of polylingual languaging, Jørgensen remarks that “the specificities of polylingual languaging may involve the integration of features from many

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different sets of features, and may involve all levels of linguistic description—including syntax, morphology, pronunciation, etc.” (2008, 170). This might also entail that no integration of linguistic levels occurs between primary and donor languages. Uses of multiple languages in contingent, ever-changing contexts involving participants with very different sociocultural repertoires (Blommaert 2008) entail a wide range of possibilities in terms of plurilingual practices that may also depend on the user’s language skills (Jørgensen 2008, 170) in addition to context. This would make it difficult, if not inappropriate to the context, to categorise plurilingual phenomena according to the integration of the donor language into the base language, as has been proposed (Poplack, Sankoff, and Miller 1988; Poplack 2004). However, a tendency for morphological assimilation into English in plural contexts was noticed in the corpus in relation to specific Japanese items, and a choice was made to look into these occurrences. In line with Poplack and Sankoff’s theory, it was posited that the English pluralising marker would be more likely to occur in items that are integrated to a higher degree into the primary language of communication. Due to the distinctive nature of ELF communication, the use of the two separate terms to mark a distinction will be avoided, but it will be determined whether items that appear more integrated into the English language, that is, encoded in the OED and with higher frequencies in a reference corpus, are more likely to be morphologically adapted to the surrounding primary language, i.e. English. Out of the eight items, four were listed in the OED (ninja, katana, kata, and shuriken), while the other four (jutsu, kunai, shinobi, and yǀkai) were not. A crosscheck was run on two online corpora: the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and the British National Corpus (BYU-BNC) to determine whether presence in the reference dictionary may correspond to higher frequencies in the corpora. Indeed, items in the first group were all identified in the corpora, while only one item in the second group appeared in the corpora: shinobi. Of first-group items, ninja, shuriken, and kata appear with the -s plural form in both corpora, while katana does not. All instances of katana, however, express singularity; as a result, there is no way to ascertain whether a zero marking or the English suffix would have been used. Due to the low frequency numbers for some of these items it is not possible to make generalisations, but where the items expressed both singularity and plurality in COCA, a tendency could be noticed that favoured the English marker -s over the zero form. For example, plural instances of ninja always bear the English pluralising suffix. In BYU-

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BNC, ninja always occurred as a pre-modifier in plural contexts (e.g. Ninja Turtles15; ninja warriors) so the tendency may not be confirmed. The OED itself, in the related entry, signals that the lack of both morphological marker and the suffix -s is acceptable in plural contexts. Kata and shuriken appear in the corpora either with the English marker or as pre-modifiers (e.g. shuriken stars) in plural contexts. It has to be noted that, with the exception of ninja, which occurs more frequently in BYU-BNC and COCA, the other items appear only in a very limited number of source texts that specifically reference Japanese martial arts or fiction. In the fan fiction corpus, all instances of OED-integrated items in plural contexts bore the English suffix -s, in line with our prediction. The expected tendency for the group of items not listed in the OED was to maintain the zero-marked form even in plural contexts, with the English suffix -s occurring as an occasional exception. This was true only for shinobi and jutsu. Shinobi, which, as we have seen, is a synonym for ninja, occurs as a lone lexeme four times in plural contexts, but the pluralising English suffix occurs only once. For jutsu, it was one occurrence out of five. The item jutsu, with its variations, deserves a little more attention. Jutsu (literally “skill,” “technique”) in Japanese is a bound morpheme that is used to refer to the ensemble of techniques or skills in a specific practice (e.g. kenjutsu—the art of swordsmanship): in the manga Naruto, jutsu is used as a free morpheme defining the fighting techniques acquired by the characters, as well as a suffix to indicate a specific set of techniques, such as genjutsu (illusionary techniques), that is involving supernatural powers.16 This analysis was limited to its use as a free morpheme. In contrast, kunai and yǀkai—respectively a ninja weapon and mythological supernatural creatures—always occurred with the marker -s when expressing plurality. As other Japanese items in the corpus only occurred in singular contexts, it is impossible to say which form would be preferred in plural contexts. Where the first group of items is concerned, usage appears to reflect a tendency to morphological assimilation into the primary language, whereas in the second group, the items reflect a varying and uneven degree of morphological integration into English. This tendency might suggest that prolonged and constant use of recurring lexical items in fandom-related communication might trigger a 15

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (TMNT) is an American comic that has spanned animated series, toys, and live action movies, http://turtlepedia.wikia.com/wiki /Main_Page Accessed July 20, 2016. 16 http://naruto.wikia.com/wiki/Genjutsu. Accessed July 20, 2016

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process of morphological assimilation into the primary language comparable to that of items already integrated in the main code, leading to higher degrees of assimilation within specific online communities or, more generally, in the manga/anime fandom. These communities engage in distinctive, group-bound linguistic practices that not only include codeswitching but also draw from a variety of registers and in-group languages. As a consequence, morphological assimilation may occur as users start perceiving non-English items as unmarked elements within their heteroglossic practices in specific sociolinguistic environments. On the other hand, users may avoid morphological assimilation as part of a conscious effort to underline the item’s association with a different culture. While the overwhelming majority of code-switching instances in the corpus involve either insertional code-switching of this kind or basic formulaic language, a small number of instances also occurred where switches were longer and either alternational or intersentential, including song lyrics in languages other than English.

5.5 Longer Strings and Lyrics In addition to the single-word insertional switches described above, longer switches also occurred in the corpus, usually relating to character catchphrases reproduced directly from the original Japanese text (e.g. mada mada da ne [example 36], omae o korosǀ [chapter four, example 23]), so as to be easily recognisable, and in some cases understandable, by readers. Indeed, in the latter case a translation was also provided within the narration to clarify the meaning of the phrase for readers who may not be familiar with it. Only one instance of alternational code-switching was identified, where the character alternates between English and his L1, German, at the intrasentential level; in the context of this sentence, German appears to be the base language. (17) “Du weißt … Italien, I think ich …” I love it how he slips between English and German when he is tired … “Ich liebe dich” (you know … Italy, I think I … I love you, ger.).

Examples of code-switching in Hetalia and Noir stories have different implications than instances of Japanese switches in other fan-produced texts. In most stories found in the corpus, set in Japan, characters are assumed to speak Japanese among themselves. Switches in these contexts are therefore not to be perceived as switches within the dialogues, but as narrative devices employed by authors in order to include linguistic

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elements in the text that contribute to affiliating characters with a specific linguacultural background, that is Japanese (see examples 39 to 42). In Hetalia and Noir, however, the setting and the characters are international and characters from different linguacultural backgrounds are represented, which entails the use of a shared language of communication. As Noir is set in France, it would be fair to assume that the language of communication for characters in the monastery is French, whereas with Hetalia, whose characters are personifications of countries, the situation is not as clear-cut. The Hetalia wiki has a language section explaining that “the nations in the series are said to speak different languages at various times, including their own. But it is implied that they all share one specific universal language that they can understand.17” While there are no clues as to which language is used as a lingua franca in the original text, English may be assumed to be the language of communication in the fan fiction, as it is the language writers are employing to produce stories geared towards an international audience. As a result, code-switching as it occurs within direct speech in Hetalia and, to a more limited extent, Noir stories in the corpus, constitutes a direct representation of the character’s voice, which, through the pen of the author, alternates two languages in a given interaction. In example (17), the alternational switch is acknowledged by the author in the narrative segment; the first person narrator states that he loves to hear Germany switch between the language of communication and his L1. The narrative segment appears to flag the marked language choice in the direct speech and may be said to fulfil what Appel and Muysken have defined as the metalinguistic function, as a comment is made on the use of plurilingual elements in the utterance (1995, 120). This alternational switch, on the other hand, may be ascribed to the function identified by Gumperz as personalisation vs objectification (1982, 79). According to this function, switches to a different language may be employed to mark speaker involvement, personal opinion, or knowledge in an utterance. In the instance above, the character’s L1 is employed as a marked, subjective choice to express deep feelings: a declaration of love to a romantic interest. In addition to longer switches, the corpus also included songfic based on songs that are originally not in English. One was Japanese, and original lyrics from a song from the soundtrack of the anime were incorporated in the text, not only as inspiration but as part of the narration, as shown in example (18) below: 17

http://hetalia.wikia.com/wiki/Terminology_in_Hetalia:_Axis_Powers. Accessed July 20, 2016.

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The original lyrics are employed in the text with no translation provided. In this example, the two languages used in the story, English and Japanese, fulfil two different functions in the story: the Japanese lyrics provide authenticity and remain true to the original text, while the primary language, English, ensures that the story is accessible to international readers. This type of switch may be related to the function of “direct quotation” as theorised by Gumperz (1982, 75–6). The writer here may be seen as quoting the lyrics of the song in their original language, which is different than the base language of the text. As the original anime has a sci-fi theme, the character’s connection to a linguacultural Japanese background is feeble, and the switch does not appear to mark Lacus’s heritage but rather the cultural origin of the anime. A translation for the lyrics was not provided; however, lack of an English version does not impair reader comprehension of the story, as the lyrics of the song have no narrative purpose—it is the singing itself that attracts the other character’s attention. In the second example, it is a Portuguese song that is involved in the production of a story written by a writer whose L1 is Portuguese. Single verses from the song are inserted in the text, alternating song and narrative: (19) Every Shadow (Cada Sombra) In your Voice (da tua voz.) By Yourself? That’s too dangerous!—She said, he knew she was worried, he knew her too well.

The text above is both an example of discourse and linguistic heteroglossia: songfic plays well within the intertextual reality of fan fiction, and more so in this case where the lyrics are not quoted only at the beginning or the end of the story but are inserted in the text, the narrative of the lyrics anticipating the events of the story. The writer has translated the lyrics of the song so that it would be understandable to her readers, but maintained the original Portuguese text in brackets. The super-diversity of fandom and its related practices is here highlighted, as the Japanese linguacultural background of the original text intermingles with the Portuguese song that constitutes the other element of inspiration for the

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author. The writer, in turn, is making a marked choice that signals her own Portuguese identity by inserting a local song in the text, and makes it accessible to everyone through translation into English.

5.6. Interjections and Formulaic Language While single-word items occur in both narrative segments and direct dialogue, other elements, by their very nature, were found exclusively in direct dialogue. These types of switches are referred to as emblematic switches (Poplack 1980), interjections (Gumperz 1982), or tag-switches (Appel and Muysken 1995). These switches “[refer] to tags, exclamations, pause fillers, or function words (e.g. conjunctions or affirmatives) in one language that are inserted in an utterance of another language” (Klimpfinger 2007, 40–1), and contribute to signalling culture. This function may be fulfilled both with switches that “explicitly refer to concepts associated with a specific culture” (ibid., 40), as was seen in the section above, and switches “to another language to implicitly give a linguistic emblem of this culture” (ibid.). In the corpus, 33 different types of emblematic switches were identified in five different languages (Japanese, Italian, German, Chinese, and Hungarian), for a total of 69 instances. Such interjections included interrogative words, discourse markers, non-lexical fillers, conversational routines (greetings, farewells, apologies, etc.), and exclamations. This type of switch was not only identified as the most frequent code-switching phenomenon in ELF contexts, but has also been detected in code-switching studies relating to CMC: the patterns of use of plurilingual elements suggest “‘minimal bilingualism’ in which sets of English chunks and formulized routines (including greetings and farewells, interjections and discourse organizers, requests, slogans, etc.) are inserted into the base national or majority language” (Androutopoulos 2013b, 678–9). In this case, however, English is not the donor language embedded in a shared based language, but there are multiple languages occurring in a given interaction, of which the main one, shared by all participants, is here identified as lingua franca English. In addition, these linguistic choices appear to be “often indexical to the groups’ lifestyle orientation” (ibid., 679; see also Androutsopoulos 2004; 2006), which is in consonance with the frequent use of Japanese switches in the corpus; these linguistic practices situate the fans and their products in a fandom involved with texts stemming from a Japanese background. The most frequent type of switch in the category of interjections is constituted by routine formulae, “highly conventionalized prepatterned expressions whose occurrence is tied to more or less standardized

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communication situations” (Coulmas 1981, 2), also referred to as conversational formulae or discoursal expressions (Ajimer 1996). From a pragmatic point of view, “definitions of formulaic language include three parts: the form as a recurrent sequence, its occurrence in specific social contexts, and the idea of the social contract, which extends to members of a particular speech community” (Bardovi-Harlig 2012, 207). They are a common site for switches in direct dialogue in the corpus, especially frequent, grammatically frozen expressions, as they allow writers to draw attention to the utterance by making marked language choices that are easily reproducible even without substantial knowledge of the donor language. Items in this category include words and formulae that are used to express greetings, farewells, apologies, compliments, and orders, and they generally contribute to the managing of social interactions. Switches appear to occur singularly in most instances in the corpus; that is, only one of the characters involved in the exchange switches into the donor language, while trigger or response utterances remain entirely in English. There are three examples of adjacency pairs in the switched language in the corpus, reported below in examples (20) and (21): (20) “Tadaima!” He yelled entering the house. (I’m home, jp.) “Okaerinasai” Hitomi said “How was school?” (Welcome home, jp.)

The pair tadaima and okaerinasai is used as a greeting upon returning to the house, in relation to family and relatives. Here, Hitomi’s younger brother greets her as he comes back to the house and the girl answers with the expected formula. (21) “Hiro-kun, daijǀbu ka?” Aki asked, a worried look on his face … (Are you okay? jp.) “Hai, Aki-san, but please …” (Yes, jp.)

In this exchange, Aki asks a second character whether he is okay in Japanese and receives a positive answer, always in Japanese. At the completion of the routinised turns, the conversation is carried on in English. In the third instance, two characters mutually wish each other a good night: (22) —Oyasumi Masahiro-kun… (goodnight, jp.) —Oyasumi Kaori-chan …

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Except for the examples above, in other instances plurilingual elements are present in only one turn of the exchange. Conversational routines with pragmatic functions, such as the ones presented above, were not uncommon in the corpus: greetings, for example, were often switched into the L1 in self-introduction by characters: (23) Ciao, ciao everyone! (Hello, it.) (24) Szia! (Hello, hu.) (25) Hallo, I’m here! (Hello, ger.)

The informal greetings in the various languages are used by Hetalia characters (respectively Italy, Hungary, and Germany) as they introduce themselves as first-person narrators in the stories. The use of a switched greeting as the first words pronounced by the characters contributes to their immediate identification by the readers before their names appear in the text, and at the same time the switch serves the purpose of signalling the character’s primary linguacultural background. In addition to greetings, other types of formulae are employed that contribute to the construction of social relationships among characters in the stories. Farewells: (26) Sayǀnara, chosen one. (goodbye, jp.) (27) Oyasumi, Kaori-chan.

Apologies: (28) Gomen nasai, I didn’t mean to. (I’m sorry, jp.)

Thanks: (29) Arigatǀ, senpai. (Thank you, senpai, jp.) (30) —Safety first—Chloe said after she showed her papers. —Danke schön—a boy from the staff thanked Susan, receiving the tip. At the last second the priestess remembered about her German passport. It was Chloe’s idea (“It will make you more anonymous this way”).

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In the last example, the switch fulfils a narrative purpose as it acts as a trigger for the character to remember that, to ensure anonymity during travel, a fake German passport had been forged in order to book the hotel. The staff member employs the basic German thanking formula in danke schön, as he assumes that Susan is German. A flashback follows where the reader learns, through reported direct speech in the narrative segment— signalled by both brackets and inverted commas—that the idea of the fake passport came from her partner because of a need for anonymity. Susan and Chloe’s anonymity at the hotel is an important element in the story as it hides their presence from two other characters who are also on the premises, with whom they have a tense relationship. The story builds up to their encounter and the temporary truce they establish to rid the hotel of a group of skinheads. Examples (27), (29), and (30) above may be considered instances of intersentential code-switching within the textual context of the story, as they consist of switched elements at the sentence boundary. It may be said that the entire utterance consists of a switch within the text; however, the utterance is entirely in Japanese, while (28) includes, in addition to the Japanese routine for wishing a good night, a personal suffix attached to the addressee’s name that denotes familiarity. (31) “Oi, Hiro, daijǀbu ka?” The blonde boy asked with a worried look on his face … “Yes …” (Are you okay? jp.)

In example (31), the use of the routine formula is preceded by the use of the interjection “Oi,” which, like in British English, is used as an exclamation to draw a person’s attention (Oi, wait!; Oi Kaori!). An attention-drawing function is similarly fulfilled by the Japanese particle ne/nee when additional emphasis is given, when found in the initial position in an utterance. In the corpus, all instances of ne/nee in initial position introduce a question, as in the examples below: (32) Nee, Aki, how can he be so stupid?

In this context, the particle has the function of drawing the interlocutor’s attention and signalling an upcoming request for a conversational exchange. The same particle was also identified at the end of a number of utterances. In this position “the affective marker ne … is a frequent feature marking alignment” (Ohta 1999, 1499). As may be seen in example (33), the marker acts as a question tag, asking the interlocutor for confirmation.

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(33) Their opinion of us was wrong, ne Hitomi-san?

In this example, a choice was made to mark the utterance with a switch, using the Japanese particle ne to express the English question tag “wasn’t it?”, “or right?” In both cases, the switch does not impair communication if readers are not familiar with the particle, as the content of the dialogues reported in examples (32) and (33) is not altered by the switch. The only other discourse marker identified in the corpus was ano, always found in the initial position with the meaning of “um” or “well.” (34) She looked about to say something. “Ano … Aki …” Aki looked back at the girl and stared at her “Thanks for today.”

In the corpus, the seven instances of ano appear to act as a delay device, expressing hesitation and potentially the shyness of the speaking character, as in the example above. However, English discourse markers and fillers occur much more frequently, suggesting that, while these items were used by ELF writers in their stories, they are not a favoured element for switching when compared to the conversational routines analysed above. It has to be noted that the routines involved in the switches include very common, simple formulae such as greetings, thanks, and apologies that consist of one or two words. In the case of multi-word elements, they are generally located at the “frozen” end of the idiomatic continuum, implying that these expressions do not allow significant syntactic, lexical, or even grammatical variation. This makes them easily acquired and reproducible in other contexts. Basic formulaic expressions such as the ones identified in the corpus, with few exceptions, do not require fluency in the source languages on the part of either writer or reader. Single-word exclamations are also common, as the use of a single word would not involve knowledge of grammar or syntax of the language employed in the switch. For this reason, exclamations were not infrequent in the corpus. (35) The woman walked to his chair and knocked him on his head. Hard. “ITAI! Why did you do that for!” Aki rubbed his head. (Ouch, jp.)

The story segment above shows the character reacting to a hit to his head with a switch to Japanese, an exclamation that signals pain—Itai may be translated as “ouch”—followed by an utterance in English. In this case, knowledge of the meaning of the Japanese exclamation is not essential to the comprehension of the passage, which is easily inferable through the surrounding text.

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(36) “See, you can improve if you work hard.” He showed him the grammar exercises he’d done and there were a few correct answers. “Sugoi,” Hiro sighed in a sarcastic tone. (Awesome, jp.) “Mada mada da ne, Senpai!” Aki chuckled. (You still have a long way to go, jp.)

Here, however, the readers are required to be familiar with the meaning of the expressions used in the switch to make sense of the exchange between the two characters. Sugoi—awesome—is used here sarcastically by Hiro as he is told that he needs to work harder to get better grades in English at school. The playful retort is a trademark line by the character in the original text, meaning “you still have a long way to go.” The use of this expression therefore not only marks the character’s identity as Japanese, but is a deliberate choice by the author to show her familiarity with the original Japanese text and, as a result, signal her affiliation with that fandom as a knowledgeable person. A character’s linguacultural background may also be signalled through the use of culturally bound onomatopoeia. The corpus included two main examples of this occurrence, as seen below: (37) Yumi is very happy, nya! (38) “Boo!” “Kyaaaaaah!!!”

In example (37), the utterance ends with the onomatopoeic element nya, which constitutes a switch as it is a graphic representation of cats meowing in Japanese. The item is pronounced by a cat-human character known as nekomimi: a girl with feline attributes, usually cat ears and a tail. The feline traits of these characters cross over in their language, as this nonlexical filler signals the character’s identity as a nekomimi. Urban Dictionary provides multiple definitions for the onomatopoeia, described as “simply japanese for meow” and a “suffix added to the end of sentences uttered by a cat/human-cat in Japanese culture (mostly anime),” which suggests that the term may be considered as a free morpheme, employed either on its own or as a suffix. In the second example, the onomatopoeic kyaaa is used to express surprise and fright in reaction to the other character’s prank. Indeed, kya in Japanese indexes screaming. Among manga/anime fans, this onomatopoeic item is generally associated with positive connotations of screaming, and kya, in its different orthographic renditions, is usually employed to express a squeal of delight, often in relation to something that is kawaii—cute. It has to be noted that discourse markers, non-lexical fillers, and onomatopoeic words were less frequent in the corpus than expected. As

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items not expressing semantic content, these elements would have allowed authors to mark utterances without potentially harming reader comprehension; however, a preference was given to content words which entail knowledge of their meaning on the part of the readers in order to follow the entire exchange. On the other hand, English fillers (hm, uhm) and discourse markers (you know; I mean, well) were not uncommon within dialogues in the story. This tendency may be due to the heteroglossic nature of the contexts of use fans are likely to participate in as they acquire elements of other languages and assimilate them into their language use in specific situations. Conversational routines, such as the ones described above (daijǀbu ka? and itadakimasu) as well as interjections (ja, nein, and itai!), are easily acquired and reproduced holistically, as they are either fixed expressions or single words that do not require syntactic, grammatical, or extensive pragmatic competence in the donor language. On the other hand, appropriate use of discourse markers, non-lexical fillers, and phatic exclamations drawn from other languages would entail a level of pragmatic competence that most manga/anime fans may not possess in all the languages they employ in their texts. Studies on the acquisition of discourse markers by language learners and users show that NNSs of a given language tend to make a much more limited use of discourse markers in the L2 (Sankoff et al. 1997, Fuller 2003; Fung and Carter 2007), and functions in L2 use do not overlap native usage (Müller 2005; Prodromou 2008). Results obtained by Fuller (2003) support studies that say that NNSs use fewer discourse markers than NSs. While use of discourse markers in ELF is not within the scope of our investigation, it was noted that English common markers (well; you know; I mean; by the way) and non-lexical fillers (uhm; eh) are fairly frequent in direct speech in the corpus. Writers are therefore not avoiding markers in non-native language use, just switches. The tendencies highlighted in the study above might contribute to explaining why “donor” language markers are uncommon as emblematic switches in the corpus. Another possible aspect in contributing to this tendency in the text is related to the role that markers and non-lexical fillers play in the structuring and organisation of spoken exchanges, rather than in the expression of content. Switches bearing semantic content would appear more marked and, as a result, draw the reader’s attention in a more immediate way to the switch. A different tendency was noticed in relation to honorifics, titles, and terms of address, which contribute to shaping relationships between characters in the story. Japanese personal suffixes and titles were indeed

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the most frequent type of switch in the corpus: about half the instances of Japanese language in the corpus involved either element.

5.7 Honorifics A choice was made to analyse the two categories of honorific suffixes and Japanese terms of address together, not only because they are both related to the Japanese system of honorific speech but also because some of the honorific titles included in the second category also function as suffixes when attached to a person’s first or family name. Japanese honorific speech—keigo—is a complex system of social deixis that involves both grammar and morphology and fulfils a number of pragmatic and social functions. Simply put, honorific speech in Japanese, including titles and name suffixes, signals either equality or inequality in rank, as well as social distance or familiarity with either an interactional addressee or a grammatical referent (Shibamoto-Smith 2011, 3707). As Okamoto explains, “two aspects of the interpersonal relationship between the participants in a conversation, that is, the hierarchical relationship, or status difference (i.e. vertical distance), and the degree of intimacy, or ingroup/out-group (uchi/soto) distinction, (i.e. horizontal distance) have been commonly identified as the most important factors” (Okamoto 2011, 3673). The relative social status of the speaker to the addressee or referent may depend on a number of elements, such as age, gender, occupation, social rank, and relationship between speaker and addressee/referent; according to such elements, the speaker adopts the most appropriate forms of honorific language in a given communicative context. It is, however, beyond the scope of this investigation to discuss the massive literature surrounding keigo, as the writers in the corpus only make use of simpler elements of honorific speech; that is, titles and a limited number of common suffixes that can easily be inserted into the English text. In the corpus, five different personal suffixes were used along with five titles and three additional terms of address. Two of the titles that function as both free morphemes and suffixes were also found in the latter use. Suffixes appeared to be the most frequent type of Japanese language in the corpus, as there were 539 total instances, whereas the 4 titles totalled 106 occurrences, including suffix uses. The suffixes encountered in the corpus were: x San: the most common honorific, used by people of equal status as a title of respect. It is also used when addressing or referring to a senior. The instances of the use of -san in the corpus included

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x x

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family-related honorifics such as niisan (older brother) (Kaiser et al. 2013, 13–18) Chan: this is used generally for young children and for pets, but its function can be extended to express intimacy between older people, especially females, when they are close friends (ibid., 19). The latter use is especially frequent in the corpus Kun: its use is gender-bound, as it is only applied to boys when they have a close relationship with the speaker addressing them (ibid.) Sama: this is a more formal suffix than san and is generally used to show respect for someone who holds a higher rank than the speaker (ibid.). It may be used in the form niisama to signal respect for older brothers, as was also seen in the corpus Dono: this is no longer commonly used in conversational Japanese, but is still a “form of address used for official letters and business letters, and in letters to inferiors.”18 It is often found in manga and anime as a personal suffix in dialogue

Once the suffixes were identified, a Wordsmith search was run for each of them in order to determine frequencies and contexts of use, and to hypothesise which functions such suffixes play in the stories. The most common suffixes used in the corpus are respectively -san (202 instances), -chan (109), and -kun (110). The widespread use of -chan and -kun, used generally for children, pets, and close friends, suggests in itself that the characters interacting have a close relationship with each other, as they use a marker of intimacy that is in addition supported by the age of the characters, who tend to be adolescents or young adults in many stories in the corpus. As anticipated above, uses of -san, -chan, and -sama occurred in relation to family honorifics, namely niisan (47 occurrences), niisama (13 occurrences), and a single instance of (o)niichan for older brother, as well as 4 instances of nƝsama—respected older sister. Analysis of the Wordsmith output for the personal suffixes showed a distinct tendency in the use of this type of honorific form, which appeared for the overwhelming majority within dialogues in the story, as the characters were either being directly addressed or referred to: (39) “How do you feel Hinata-san?” (40) “Sorry, Hiromi-chan, but I have a date with Kaori-chan.” 18 http://www.jisho.org/words?jap=danna&eng=&dict=edict&romaji=on. Accessed July 20, 2016.

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As can be seen, example (40) includes both the direct address and the referential use of the personal suffix. Widespread in-dialogue use of these suffixes reflects the intention on the writer’s part to signal an important linguacultural element in Japanese social deixis. Despite the presence of Japanese characters in stories inspired by manga not set in Japan, or crossover/alternative universe stories, in such cases the suffixes are always forgone, as culturally-bound honorific speech would not be relevant in a non-Japanese context with a majority of non-Japanese characters. In addition to dialogue, personal suffixes may also be found embedded in the narrative prose, but it was noted that such occurrences were both significantly scarcer (28 against 518 in-dialogue occurrences) and related to the narrative mode adopted in the story. Specifically, narrative point of view was considered as a criterion for the use or non-use of personal suffixes in the texts, involving three types of narrator: x

First-person narrator: 18 instances of personal suffix use were identified embedded in narrative prose told from the point of view of one of the characters, as shown in example (41) below: (41) I’m telling him about Hiro-sama, about myself and other things, but he never listens to me.

x

Subjective third-person narrator: nine occurrences were found in third-person narratives of a subjective nature; that is, from a character’s point of view. This character’s thoughts and feelings are described, but the narrator has no access to those of other characters: (42) Ai was lying in her bed, thinking about something she should not be thinking about … and about a boy that isn’t Naruto-kun.

x

Objective third-person narrator: only one instance could be found of personal suffix use in a story narrated by an omniscient third-person narrator, exemplified by the following example. (43) The sensei turned to Hiro-kun and spoke firmly.

While narration was not always consistent in the stories, and point of view may switch back and forth between two characters without any type of signal, it was not problematic to distinguish the narrative point of view in the paragraph surrounding the suffixed names. This investigation on the use of personal suffixes, according to direct dialogue and narrative point of view, was useful in highlighting that writers appear to be much more likely to add personal suffixes while

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giving voice to the actual Japanese characters by including culturally loaded linguistic elements in the dialogue. Much more rarely, such uses were identified in the narrative prose in contexts where they may still be considered relevant; that is, when the narrative is told from the point of view of a specific character, whose voice is carried over in the prose through the employment of marked linguistic choices, such as the one described above. A reverse crosscheck was made by selecting the most frequent first names in the corpus (Naruto, Sasuke, Hinata, Sakura, and Oichi) and running a query on Wordsmith Tools for their R1-position collocates— that is, the word occurring immediately after the name—which are shown in the table below. Table 5.3. R1 collocates for frequent first names in the corpus Name

R1 collocates (order of frequency)

Naruto

-kun

said

and

Sasuke

-kun

said

was

Sakura

was

-chan

said

Hinata

said

-chan

was

Oichi

-chan

-dono

-sama

As can be seen in the data reported in Table 5.3, the personal suffixes are amongst the most frequent R1 collocates for all the names taken into consideration, and the name Oichi had three different suffixes, signalling various degrees of familiarity (-chan) and respect (-dono, -sama). For the other items, a certain consistency can be noted in that the verbs “said” and “was” recur alongside the personal suffix. The patterns “Name was/said” occur in the narrative prose, and the latter is generally identifiable as a speech tag between strings of dialogue in the story. In turn, instances of zero-marked names—Name0—occurring in dialogues were rare. This crosscheck appears to confirm the hypothesis that the use of personal suffixes in the corpus is the result of a conscious choice on the part of the writers. The suffix is added to a given name when it is uttered by a character either in dialogue or in narrative prose from a specific character’s point of view. The suffix used will depend on the relationship of said character with the addressee or referent, as shown in the most

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frequent collocates for the name Oichi. Absence of suffix, on the other hand, is usually associated with narrative prose, especially when it is not expressing the thoughts and feelings of a specific character: the omniscient narrator, having no involvement with the other characters, makes no direct use of social deixis, as we might expect. There are also explicit references in the dialogues to the varying use of suffixes according to the relationship between the speaker and the addressee/referent. In the examples below, characters who are being addressed with a specific suffix give the speakers permission to address them with a less formal one. (44) “What should I do Tanaka-san?” “Please, call me Sasuke-kun.” She nodded. (45) “Their opinion of us was wrong, ne Hitomi-san?” … “You can call me Hinata-chan, Hiro-kun. San makes me feel old, besides, you’re my friend now.”

In the examples above, the cultural role of the suffixes is highlighted as their use and function as markers of social relations are addressed explicitly in the story. In both examples, a character uses the -san honorific to show respect to their interlocutor, and in the remark the character is encouraged to use a different one, bearing a connotation of intimacy and familiarity. In the second example, the use of the suffix is also accompanied by the Japanese pragmatic particle ne—seen in example 33—reinforcing the tie to Japanese culture. Hinata allows Hiro to use the suffix -chan because it is usually associated with younger people (“San makes me feel old”—example 45) and because their relationship has grown into friendship. The explicit reference to personal suffix use in the story also has a specific function in plot advancement: a shift of suffix implies and signals a parallel shift in the actual relationship between characters. Readers are then expected to be familiar with at least the most common suffixes in order to fully comprehend how character dynamics change and evolve in the story.

5.7.1 Titles and Terms of Address Related to personal suffixes are titles, some of which, as mentioned, may also function as suffixes. Five titles are identified in the corpus: x Sensei is used as a title for teachers and professionals who deserve respect and it may be used as an honorific subject, attached to the

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given name.19 It is the most frequent title in the corpus, with 46 instances Senpai indicates a superior at work or school Kǀhai is used to address/refer to a younger student or workmate Hime means princess Danna indicates the master “of a house, of a shop, etc.” or a husband, as well as a “male patron, customer, or person of high status.”20 In the corpus, this title is limited to five uses, all related to the same character, who is addressed/referred to as danna—in this case meaning “master”

The relatively high frequency of the titles sensei and senpai (34 instances) may be explained if we consider the young age and background of many characters of the stories in the corpus, who are likely to either address or refer to a teacher (at school or in martial arts) or an older person in their group. The use of these titles in the text reflects that of the personal suffixes described above: the titles are most commonly used in direct dialogue, and when they appear in the narrative prose they generally carry over the voice of the character who is telling the story. The only item for which this pattern does not occur is sensei, as the output showed that the majority of instances were found in narrative segments told by an omniscient narrator. This break in the pattern, however, may be easily explainable in relation to the meaning of sensei itself, which may be used as a descriptor—the sensei—or as a suffix to the name to underline the role of the character as a teacher, sports coach, etc., a function that in English would be fulfilled by a title preceding the name (e.g. Coach Smith; Dr. Smith). In addition to titles, a number of terms of address were identified in the corpus. Two of those are the Japanese nouns baka and dobe, which both may be translated as “stupid, idiot,” and the third one, temee, is a second person pronoun with a strongly negative connotation. The use of the latter two terms is associated with their appearance in the original manga, where two characters occasionally address each other by using rude language. In our corpus, temee was sometimes used as a personal suffix attached to one of the character’s first names, namely Sasuke from the manga Naruto. This tendency was only identified in the text by one single writer, but it is widespread enough for the website TV Tropes to criticise it in one of its 19

http://www.jisho.org/words?jap=sensei&eng=&dict=edict&romaji=on. Accessed July 20, 2016 20 Ibid.

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articles.21 This suggests that non-standard uses of other languages may spread within fandom if the alternative use is picked up by other fans, and it may become fanon. Such a use may have been influenced by the translation that is usually given of temee, that is, “you jerk” or “you bastard”; it would make sense in this case that Sasuke-temee would be perceived as “Sasuke-jerk.” While the overwhelming majority of honorific speech and terms of address are related to Japanese, the corpus includes a few examples of titles and terms of address in other languages, namely French, Italian, and German. The examples in the other languages all occurred in stories set outside Japan in non-English speaking countries. The French Monsieur occurred four times within the same story, inspired by the manga Noir, which is partly set in France (as is the original text). Use of Italian and German does not include traditional honorifics, such as monsieur in French, but of other terms of address that relate to the source text, Hetalia. The characters in the manga are personifications of countries, with the main cast formed by countries in both the Axis Powers and the Allies during World War II. While these characters have human given names, they are also addressed with the name of the country they represent (e.g. Italy, South Italy, Belgium, Prussia, etc.). In three occurrences, the name of the country/nationals was adapted to the language spoken in the country taken into consideration, as seen below: (46) It’s me! Italia! (47) I’m Hungary … and a Magyar. (48) That strict Deutsch …

In examples (46) and (47), it is the characters themselves using their L1s in the story, while in the last example the term Deutsch is used by a Chinese character employing an LN. As North and South Italy, two brothers, are both the main characters in the original text and are fan favourites, the use of Italian in Hetalia fan fiction tends to be more frequent than other languages also in relation to terms of address. The brothers may address each other as fratello (brother), or as sorella in one specific AU where the Italian brothers are portrayed as women. 21 “There is no such honorific as ‘-teme!’ It’s a pronoun! A PRONOUN! To quote Naruto, ‘Sasuke, TEME!’ means ‘Sasuke, you!!’ ‘Teme’ is considered a very, very rude, insulting version of ‘you,’ and not ‘bastard,’ not ‘jerk,’ not anything else!” http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GratuitousJapanese (Accessed July 20, 2016, emphasis in original).

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The analysis of these two categories of language in the corpus showed that personal suffixes, titles, and terms of address are not used at random to give “flavour” to the stories, but their use seems to be associated with specific contexts. The main function of Japanese honorifics, titles, and terms of address is to signal culture, both in terms of characters and of the background setting when the stories are set in Japan, or fictional universes that are still strongly inspired by Japan. Indeed, it was noted that when stories were set in different countries than Japan, with a cast of international characters, either because it was part of the original material (e.g. D-gray man; Noir; Hetalia) or because the writer created an alternative universe, suffixes and titles were not used, even by the Japanese characters. On the other hand, instances of French, Italian, and German in the corpus were identified in non-Japanese geographical and cultural settings and employed similarly to signal culture, as seen above. In addition, the code-switching function of specifying an addressee may be associated with the use of the Italian fratello between North and South Italy in a scene of the story involving multiple characters trying to get South Italy to snap out of his depression. North Italy therefore uses the common L1 to both address his brother directly and to come through to him by drawing on their common linguistic background. It may be said, therefore, that writers use these linguistic forms consciously, including them primarily in dialogues—or narrative prose, when told from a character’s point of view—as they give voice to the character’s cultural background as they negotiate their social relations with other characters. Examples (44) and (45) in particular suggest writer awareness of the importance of these forms of social deixis in Japanese culture, as they are used explicitly to signal turning points in the relationship between two characters, who will eventually become romantically involved at the end of both stories. The majority of uses were related to commonly used items in Japanese (-san, -chan, -kun, -sama, sensei, and senpai), but forms were identified that were employed only in contexts relating to specific characters, such as -danna, dobe, and temee. These show that adherence to the original texts is valued and accuracy in the portrayal of the characters is important to writers, who try and carry over, when possible, their distinctive linguistic habits into English.

5.8 Fictional Language Drawn from Source Texts This category includes all the lexical items that were either limited to the original text; that is, do not exist in Japanese. Such items include

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especially martial arts/supernatural items, as well as toponyms not found in Japanese geography. The frequency of fictional vocabulary in the domains of the supernatural and martial arts is directly related to the material the stories in the corpus were inspired by. Manga and anime with a strong fantasy element appeared to be popular, especially where this element coexists with a martial arts or ninja theme. As a result, names of rival factions and groups of practitioners were found, as well as names for specific combat techniques and attacks, which are often tied to specific superpowers (e.g. genjutsu in Naruto). This category was still deemed worthy of note because the terminology used in the original texts is usually translated in non-Japanese adaptations; for this reason, toponyms were included in this subgroup only. However, fans may have access to the Japanese words and expressions because of fan-made subtitles and participation in text-related fan talk on multiple CMC modes—especially message boards and wikis. The choice to use Japanese rather than English adaptations or periphrasis may be ascribed once again to the intention, on the part of writers, to signal the source culture, despite the primary language of the story being English, and to add some elements to their stories that are directly drawn from the original material. On occasion, the Japanese and the English terms are alternated in the story, and might fulfil different functions, as will be seen. The fictional language category may in turn be subdivided into a number of different subclasses, that is: martial arts; supernatural; nicknames; toponyms; and others. The majority of the items identified belonged to the category of martial arts, as a result of the original source texts inspiring the fan fiction. A predilection of combat-oriented texts where the main characters are skilled fighters (e.g. Naruto, Ranma 1/2, Inuyasha) resulted in higher occurrence of fictional, text-specific terminology related to this domain. On occasion, the martial arts category would overlap with the supernatural one when the techniques used involve superpowers held by the characters. The martial arts group also included battle cries: characters shout the name of the technique as they use it against their opponent, and the choice was made, in descriptive fighting scenes, to keep the cries in the original Japanese. Such cries are uttered by the characters as they perform the techniques on their opponents: (49) “Prepare to die! Sabaku sǀsǀ!” (name of supernatural technique, jp.) (50) “Shugohakke Rokujnjyon Shǀ!” (name of supernatural technique, jp.) (51) “This is unbelievable! Kawarimi!” (Replace, jp.)

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In example (51), the character uses the kawarimi technique to escape from a number of girls chasing him. Other fictional words related to martial arts include denominations that indicate a person’s level of mastery in combat, similar to the kyu and dan systems in place in real-world martial arts that marks a practictioner’s advancement in learning the form. Others, again, include names of groups or organisations (e.g. atatsuki, a rival organisation in Naruto). The three examples above are also ascribable to the supernatural category, as these techniques involve the use of superhuman powers. Other supernatural words are related to fictional creatures such as demons (e.g. jinchuriki and shukaku). As for toponyms, a choice was made to include only fictional toponyms in this research which generally have an English counterpart due to manga/anime adaptation, such as Konohagakure—village hidden in the leaves22—which is occasionally referred to with the English “Leaf” in the stories. The same occurs with Sunagakure—village hidden by sand.23 The Japanese toponyms Konoha and Suna, also in their abbreviated forms, occur in the corpus 40 and 4 times, respectively, whereas the English adaptations “Leaf” and “Sand” were used much more sparingly, that is two and three times, respectively. The reasons for this use are different for the two toponyms. In the case of Konoha, uniquely, the instances of the English adaptation were found in a story by a single author; instances of “Leaf” were found in the writer’s first story for the manga, which suggests that she may not have been familiar with the original toponym at that stage. Evidence for this interpretation can be found in the switch to the Japanese Konoha in her later work. As for Sunagakure and its English counterpart, the switch to the English “sand” appeared to occur when the toponym acted as a modifier to a noun, as in the collocations: “sand shinobi,” “sand country,” and “sand festival.” For this writer, the switch appears to perform a grammatical function. A similar type of switch occurred in a story inspired by the manga/anime Inuyasha, revolving around a young half-demon dog of the same name. Here, the title character and his half-brother Sesshǀmaru, a full demon dog, in addition to being referred to and directly addressed by name, are referred to as inu—Japanese for dog and pup. Inu is never used to address either character directly; it is used exclusively in the narration. The English word “dog” is used in reference to both Sesshǀmaru and

22 23

http://naruto.wikia.com/wiki/Konohagakure. Accessed July 20, 2016. http://naruto.wikia.com/wiki/Sunagakure. Accessed July 20, 2016.

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InuYasha by two different characters who express their disdain towards the two demons: (52) [T]he stupid dog had to go and get drunk … (53) “So much for wanting to avoid that dog’s house!”

The two instances appear in the same story, where the third person narrator switches between the point of view of two characters. The character that produces example (53) hates Sesshǀmaru but is in love with InuYasha. While generally referring to the half-demon with the Japanese inu, occasionally accompanied by the possessive adjective “his” or a positive attributive adjective (e.g. “beautiful”) to signal his feelings for the character, Sesshǀmaru switches to the English “pup” when referring to an episode that happened in the past, when InuYasha was not fully mature: (54) [H]e moved closer to the pup … (55) “[W]hy is it weird, pup?” He laughed.

The switch to English here appears to be due to the will to convey meaning nuances and highlight specific connotations, while the Japanese remains the most common and, in this case, neutral choice. This type of switch, where both Japanese and English are used to express the same item, is not limited to the two toponyms described above. It was also identified in the use of certain nicknames for the characters. Six nicknames were identified in the corpus: out of the five that had a direct English translation, two appeared in both languages in the story: kitsune (fox) and tensai (genius). In both cases, belonging to the same story, the Japanese nickname was used more frequently: kitsune was used 20 times, fox 5 times, and tensei 6 times, while genius was used 3 times. Japanese was unmistakeably the most common choice where the nickname was used in dialogues to address the character directly or to refer to him, while the Japanese/English ratio was more balanced in the narrative prose. It was, however, not possible to posit a hypothesis about an underlying reason for the switch. These occurrences, however, suggest that writers have a certain degree of command of the non-English items embedded in their stories. The only item included in the “other” category is an onomatopoeic rendition of laughter—ksesese—that is specific to characters in the manga/anime Hetalia. The element of interest in this item is that it is only present in the Japanese version of the text, and it concurs to show a

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preference on the writers’ part to adhere to the source texts with marked linguistic choices in order to enhance accuracy in character portrayal by maintaining their distinctive traits represented in the source text.

5.9 Discussion of Findings In the last two chapters, writings by international fan fiction authors engaging in manga and anime fandom were analysed in details in relation to code-switching phenomena. Due to the peculiar nature of the texts involved in the investigation, a specific methodology of analysis was adopted, as traditional code-switching paradigms would not be appropriate to analyse written language produced in such a super-diverse environment. Traditionally, code-switching studies have focused more on oral speech, with attention especially given to language alternation as it occurs in established bilingual communities, where all members share both languages of communication. It was therefore necessary to design a method of analysis that would account for the distinctive characteristics of both fan fiction writing (Leppनnen 2012; Leppनnen and Peuronen 2012) and an ELF communicative context (e.g. Cogo 2009; Klimpfinger 2007; 2009). Within the vast universe of fan fiction, the manga and anime fandom was chosen for its characteristics, which make it a fertile ground for ELF interactions: as the culture of reference is not English-speaking, being a native speaker of English in an international community of manga aficionados does not give any default advantages, as English is used as a language of international communication in relation to texts stemming from a linguacultural background neither group belongs to. In addition, the analysis of fan fiction inspired by Japanese texts greatly reduced the risks of international writers trying to imitate native speech, including specific varieties and registers, within fiction dialogues. As the analysis involved both the paratext and the fan fiction text, it was decided to adopt a mixed approach, taking into consideration the main functional frameworks of traditional code-switching (Gumperz 1982; Appel and Muysken 1995) as well as newer approaches that have emerged in more recent years (Leppनnen 2012; Leppनnen and Peuronen 2012; Jørgensen 2008; Jørgensen et al. 2011; Rampton 2011; Otsuji and Pennycook 2010; Androutsopoulos 2013a; 2013b). Globalisation processes and worldwide internet access have contributed to the emergence of new social and communicative contexts and environments that foster international and cross-cultural interaction, often by means of a shared language of communication—most commonly English. Digital

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environments have seen the emergence of virtual communities of interests—networked together—whose members engage in social and creative practices with other participants from a number of different linguacultural backgrounds. The super-diversity of these groups of people in turn fosters not only the development of practices and linguistic registers distinctive of the individual communities, as well as the wider networks of which they are a constitutive part, but also results in the simultaneous presence, in addition to the chosen language of communication, of elements drawn from other languages and varieties. The practice of infusing the language of communication with such elements is known as polylingual languaging (Jørgensen 2008), metrolingualism (Otsuji and Pennycook 2010), and linguistic heteroglossia (Leppनnen 2012). While these approaches do not mention ELF, they are however compatible with the ELF perspective (Cogo 2012a, 102). ELF users online participate in super-diverse environments where they engage in social and creative practices with other participants from a number of different linguacultural backgrounds, and elements from these backgrounds may find their way into English to fulfil a variety of purposes. Both ELF studies and the frameworks mentioned above account for the fact that speakers employing heterogeneous linguistic elements in their oral and written production do not necessarily need to be fluent in the languages and varieties they use in communication (Jørgensen 2008, 168). Codeswitching in the sense employed here is not conceived as a phenomenon entailing fluency in both shared languages, but rather as a practice where speakers/writers draw from their plurilingual resources in order to achieve their pragmatic and social aims. In ELF communication, speakers from a variety of linguacultural backgrounds may participate in a single communicative event, so that the only commonly shared language is English. However, it is not uncommon for speakers to draw elements from either their L1(s) or LN(s)—in which they are not necessarily fully fluent—to negotiate meaning and social relations (Klimpfinger 2007, 2009; Cogo 2009, 2012b; Mauranen 2014), even if they don’t necessarily have to be fluent in the LN(s). While traditional code-switching frameworks were not entirely dismissed in this analysis, by virtue of the fact that they proved applicable to the analysis of ELF communication (Klimpfinger 2007, 2009), the context under examination here called for a different approach that would account for its specificities: the online fan fiction corpus stems not only from an environment using English as its working language, but it relates to an edited, scarcely interactional mode of computer-mediated communication with its roots in traditional creative writing practices.

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While the notions of polylingual languaging, metrolingualism, and heteroglossia are not dissimilar, in the end, Leppनnen’s definition of linguistic heteroglossia was selected as the most appropriate approach, as it would account for the specificities of fan fiction writing. As such, it considers plurilingual phenomena from a narrative point of view; in fan fiction, code-switching not only fulfils traditional communicative and social functions, but its use may also be triggered by the narrative needs of the author. As seen in the last two chapters, code-switching phenomena fulfilled all three of these functions in fan fiction texts and the related paratext in my corpus data, as the fans exploited their plurilingual resources for the achievement of their pragmatic, social, and narrative aims. As ELF users, the fan fiction writers in the corpus used a common LN—English—as the base language for their texts, with the inclusion of their L1(s) and other LNs. These languages appeared as instances of insertional and alternational switches in both text and paratext, with a strong preference for insertional switches in the fan fiction texts, as shown from the data. ELF writers not only engage in linguistic heteroglossia by switching into different languages, but also by employing different varieties or registers of the same language, in both English and Japanese. Instances of abbreviations typical of text messaging (Goin 2 Yamas aftR wrk. U comin?), slang (It’s hard, dude!; What’s up?; dobe!), specific registers, for example medical (As for the epigastric area, stomach and transverse colon, also the duodenum), musical (his deep baritone perfectly harmonized with her singing), or relating to sports and martial arts (She ended up doing the katas; he started to dribble) were also identified in the corpus. The use of these varieties and jargon both fits the individual topics of the fan fiction and contributes to giving a voice to the characters and shaping their identities through their linguistic choices. Discourse heteroglossia is defined by Leppनnen (2012, 237) as the combination of different genre elements and modalities within a single text: these characteristics are distinctive of fan fiction as a remixing practice and were identified in the corpus, as authors drew not only from their linguistic repertoires, but also from their discursive resources (ibid.), which they employed in the creation of their stories. Songfics, alternative universes, and crossovers are all examples of this practice. Henry Jenkins (1992a) draws on De Certeau’s definition of reading as poaching (1984, 174), and describes fans themselves as nomadic readers, moving from text to text and adopting the bits and pieces that are relevant to their experience and interpretation of the chosen texts. The image of the wandering nomad may be useful to describe the ELF fan fiction author as

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introduced in this study. Writers move on a number of different levels or dimensions: the interpretive, the modal, and the linguistic. They engage in remixing practices, combining elements from the various texts and genres in their discursive repertoires to create a new one. They are able to navigate multiple communicative modes in CMC, as many fans engage in different social and creative practices across multimodal platforms online at the same time; they draw from their linguistic repertoires, developing heteroglossic textual practices that include multiple languages and varieties. These connected dimensions may be situated within the rhizome paradigm (Deleuze and Guattari 1987) described in chapter two. As the rhizome does not have a linear structure, the nomadic writer navigates these dimensions by moving through the ramifications, bulbs, and tubers of the rhizome freely. Writers are not tracing their way back to a hierarchically superior unit but are drawing their own path themselves, according to the principle of cartography that is associated with the rhizome model, where the structure is illustrated as a map (ibid., 12). The nomadic author may enter the map from multiple entryways, as it is “open and connectable in all its dimensions” (ibid.), and may modify the map by constantly creating and severing connections, individually or in a group, in order to adapt it to current needs. The cartographic view stresses the element of contingency of this ever-changing map as well as the performative aspect, which are relatable to both the ELF and the fandom experience. The notion of the nomadic writer fits well in relation to the concepts of translocality and deterritorialisation that characterise contemporary globalised society, and the collapse of the spatial dimension that is most visible in CMC (Hepp 2009; Leppनnen et al. 2009; Blommaert 2010; Pennycook 2012; Blommaert and Backus 2013). Indeed, “the nomad can be called the Derritorialized par excellence” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 381). The analysis has highlighted the complexities of the plurilingual practices fans and writers engage in as members of international communities that fit within Blommaert’s sociolinguistic of mobility paradigm, which focuses on “actual language resources deployed in real sociocultural, historical and political contexts” (2010, 5). In fan fiction, writers make use of the repertoire they have built, layer upon layer, over time, selecting appropriate elements according to the context at hand. The complexity and variety of resources employed in fan fiction writing and communication with the audience reflect the high linguistic variation and contingency highlighted in ELF communication (Pitzl et al. 2008; Hülmbauer 2007, 2009; Pitzl 2009, 2012; Seidlhofer 2011; Mauranen 2012), situating both contexts as super-diverse (Vertovec 2007; Cogo

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2012b) environments shaped by transnational globalisation processes. The language use analysed in this study reflects the complexity of the environments and practices fans participate in. In addition to fan fiction texts, the analysis also covered what was defined as the paratext of the stories, including author profile pages on FF.net, summaries, and Author’s Notes, as well as reader reviews. This analysis provided a complement to the investigation of the fan fiction texts; it showed how ELF writers present themselves and their work to their readers as fans and authors in an international, super-diverse environment, and how they build a dialogue with them through a system of Author’s Notes and reviews. Although writer-reader contact is not highly interactional on FF.net, analysis of the paratext suggested that the participatory and collaborative nature of fandom does not cease in less interactional contexts. ELF writers appear to be conscious of their status of NNSs of English, and most of them not only apologise pre-emptively for their “shortcomings” in the language, but also ask readers to signal any mistakes they might find in their stories: readers, in turn, encourage authors with positive reviews and constructive criticism. The functions fulfilled by plurilingual phenomena in the paratext have been shown to be mainly social and related to the construction of identity: writers and readers switch into other languages to signal affiliation to a specific linguacultural background when it’s their own or show solidarity and affiliation to another fan’s. Switches, especially into Japanese, may also be employed as markers of the fans’ identity as lovers of manga and anime. The switches used were analysed by type, not by function, as different functions may be fulfilled by the same type of switch at a given time, according to the context of use. Analysis by type, as in the case of honorifics, also allowed identification of the general tendencies in the distribution and frequency of insertional switches, suggesting that a partial specialisation of meaning might be underway, where use of a specific language to express the same notion may depend on the context of use (dialogue vs. narration) or on the nuance of meaning that the author intends to express. In the text, code-switching was used with various purposes according to the setting of the stories, where it fulfilled a number of functions.

5.9.1 Social functions These functions refer to both communication between authors and readers and communication between characters in fictional dialogues. While the

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practice of fan fiction writing is one of the least interactional in the universe of fandom, in the first context, analysis of the switches suggests that the main functions fulfilled by the switches may be ascribed to signalling culture (Klimpfinger 2007) and addressee specification (Gumperz 1982), relabelled as “specifying an addressee” by Klimpfinger (2007). Signalling culture may refer to either the projection of the writer’s own linguacultural background or a marker of solidarity towards an interlocutor from a different linguacultural background (Klimpfinger 2007, 54; 2009). In our specific context, references to a third culture were also identified as a means of signalling membership to specific communities. Switches in Japanese, which were common, contribute to the construction and projection of their identities as fans of popular culture texts, and building solidarity and social rapport with their readers. In line with Klimpfinger’s findings of code-switching in ELF (2007; 2009), switches are often interjections; however, due to the different nature of the corpora analysed, the categories identified overlap only to a certain extent. While Klimpfinger found that tags, exclamations, and parentheticals were most common in her data, in the corpus under examination the most frequent switches were, in addition to exclamations (wunderbar!), greetings (konnichiwa) and closing formulae (au revoir). These were especially common both in A/Ns, where the writers address the readers directly, and in reviews, where readers signalled their own cultures by switching into their L1 or expressed solidarity with the author by switching into their L1, regardless of the reviewer’s own background. Social functions were similarly fulfilled by the use of switches in the stories themselves, where the latter played a role in establishing and developing relations between characters. The clearest and most frequent example involved the use of Japanese personal suffixes and honorific titles in dialogues: Japanese has a complex honorific language system, which is employed at a very basic level by writers as they illustrate interpersonal relations in their fiction. Example (44) in section 5.7 (please, call me Sasuke-kun) shows that use of Japanese personal suffixes vehiculates the degree of intimacy between two characters; the variation in suffix use, especially if prompted, as in the example above, mirrors a change in the relationship. In this case, the switch fulfils not only a social function but a pragmatic function too, as the choice of suffix conveys information about the relationship between two people, as well as a narrative function. In the latter case, the development of the characters’ relationship into romance is one of the focal points in the story. Through a collocation query on personal suffixes, a tendency was noticed in writers to employ personal suffixes in dialogue and unmarked names in narrative segments, with

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suffixes however appearing with subjective (first or third person) narrators. This suggests that, where both marked and unmarked options are available, the two variants may undergo a process of meaning specialisation where they are used in different contexts. This last example confirms that switches are used for a variety of purposes and that they are often not ascribable exclusively to one specific function.

5.9.2 Pragmatic functions Pragmatic functions were not identified as frequently as social functions, and they frequently occurred together. In the paratext, addressee specification was identified as a relatively frequent underlying function of code-switching. Switches into other languages are employed in order to address a specific person or group of people among readers: the four writers who had created their profile pages in both English and their L1 included different information about themselves according to the language they were using, as pointed out directly by one of the writers: (56) “Next things will be written in [L1] because only they can understand them anyway, sorry!”

The writer here pre-emptively signals the switch and makes the reason for the language change explicit; that is, that the subsequent information on her profile page would be relevant only to those people sharing her linguacultural background. Communicative functions also emerged within the stories themselves when switches are used in dialogues between characters, where they contributed to the representation of communicative exchanges and the furthering or deepening of the plot. The function of these switches, however, varies distinctly according to the setting of the stories; as said, in most stories set in Japan, Japanese is considered to be the characters’ default language, even though the story and the dialogues are written in English. These switches do not reflect the characters’ actual language use, and for this reason they may fit better in the category of narrative functions. In the second context taken into consideration, the base language used in the text—English—is the language of shared communication among an international cast of characters, and switches into donor languages are part of the character’s speech, as seen in Hetalia and Noir fan fiction. In this context, the main function fulfilled by the switches remains signalling culture: characters switch into their L1 in order to introduce themselves and make themselves recognisable through marked linguistic choices (Ciao, ciao everyone!; Hallo, it’s me!).

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The function of addressee specification was also identified in the corpus: characters may use their L1 or an LN in order to address another specific character in a group (Please, fratello, don’t) and, in addition, to refer to another character who may not be present (I gotta tell sorella; that strict Deutsch). Personalisation vs. objectification (Gumperz 1982, 79) similarly occurs in interaction between characters, when the switch marks speaker involvement or personal opinion/knowledge in the dialogue line (I think ich … Ich liebe dich; it will be a notte perfetta!). The last group of functions identified in the corpus includes switches that contribute to the development of either characters and/or the plot.

5.9.3 Narrative functions Narrative functions in the corpus involve uses of multiple languages where the switches contribute to the development of the plot, or other aspects of the story in which they appear. Japanese switches within dialogue in stories that are set in Japan may be ascribed to this category, as the readers are supposed to assume that the entirety of the dialogues are in Japanese; that is, the characters’ L1. These switches have the main aim of signalling the characters’ linguacultural background and marking them as speakers of Japanese. In addition t o the use of nouns that express notions relative to Japanese culture and traditions (I want ramen!; Are you a kirin?), conversational routines (Itadakimasu!) and exclamations (Sugoi!) are also not uncommon in dialogue, maintaining a tie between the characters and their original background throughout the story through the use of simple, routine words and sentences that can be easily recognised by readers. The corpus, as was seen, is also interspersed with interjections, switches, or fillers (ibid., 77) that are employed to draw a character’s attention (Nee, Aki; Oi, Hiro), seek agreement or approval (ne, Hitomi-san?), or that act as fillers in a character’s dialogue line (ano … Aki …). These switches equally allow writers to fulfil social functions by marking their identity as manga/anime fans by showing a certain degree of affiliation with the source language and culture and situate themselves as knowledgeable members of the community thanks to their linguistic choices. Metalinguistic comments about the use of language may also contribute to the development of the plot, which was seen in the Hetalia story based entirely on the assonance of a character’s name with an Italian verb, as in example (22) or example (8) in chapter four, where metalinguistic discussion about accents, despite the lack of actual switches, contributes to providing relevant information to the reader.

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The narrative functions that Leppänen identified in her study on fan fiction are consistent with the examples found in this corpus: “[C]haracterization and the evocation of a particular setting” (2012, 237) may be identified as the primary narrative function fulfilled by plurilingual phenomena in the corpus, whereas transition from narrative text to dialogue, while present in the corpus, is not done systematically as in the story analysed by Leppänen. In addition, it was noted that song lyrics embedded in the text may also be relevant in terms of narrative progression of the stories (example 19, see chapter five 5.5), as the lyrics provide structure and guidance to the unravelling of the plot, “[foregrounding] particular meanings and possibilities for interpretation” (ibid.). Narrative functions complete this summary of the heteroglossic practices identified in this corpus of online fan fiction.

5.9.4 Heteroglossia and intelligibility The high frequency of insertional code-switching, which constitutes the overwhelming majority in relation to alternational code-switching and of which only one example was identified in the corpus (Du weißt … Italien, I think ich …) is in line with the output from code-switching research in ELF contexts (Klimpfinger 2007, 2009). The tendency, sustained by data frequencies, supports her claim that one-word or short fixed expressions are more appropriate choices for ELF users who opt for low-risk switches that are less likely to cause a disruption in the flow of the story for the reader that may otherwise occur in a long string of words in an unfamiliar language. Maintenance of intelligibility or, in this case, readability still appears to be a concern for ELF users. The presence of parenthetical translations embedded in the texts, or in the A/Ns at the beginnings or endings of stories and chapters, reinforces this idea as some of the writers provide the means for their readers to access the linguistic and cultural aspects of their stories they may be unfamiliar with. Translations or paraphrases of the switched items were also embedded in the narrative text, blending the explanation of the switch smoothly into the story. The risk of miscommunication in ELF is a tangible one, and particularly in this context, since there is no chance for writers and their readers to negotiate meaning on the go as in oral speech or high interaction CMC; pre-emptive strategies, such as those described above, reduce the possibility of the use of non-English elements in the text hindering the story’s enjoyment for readers unfamiliar with the switched items. This may well explain the choice some writers made to provide direct or indirect translations of the switched elements in their stories, and the

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overall tendency to employ single nouns or basic phrases in the donor languages, even when the writer is fluent in the language. As a result, it may be said that, with the exception of personal suffixes and terms of address, most of the switches analysed here have a strong symbolic aspect that coexists with the variety of purposes they fulfil. Indeed, while KellyHolmes’ (2005) observations about the paralinguistic purposes of foreign languages in multilingual advertising partly overlap with the codeswitching practices identified here, the underlying motives are different. Multilingualism in international advertising aims to draw the audience’s attention for marketing purposes, but code-switching in fan fiction may fulfil a number of functions, among which marketing the story to wider audiences is not a priority. Plurilingual practices here are not concerned with selling a product, even if that product is an amateur story published on an online platform for fans, but its symbolic role may be related to a perceived need for authenticity in the fiction; that is, the use of foreign language elements contributes to the construction of the setting and to characterisation, enhancing the experience of the reader. In addition, as seen, the level of the narration may intertwine with that of the writer’s personal experience, as the linguistic elements embedded in the text may constitute a partial reflection of the writer’s own identity and the linguistic mirror of her life experiences, which may be projected onto the story (Jwa 2012).

5.9.5 Code-switching and construction of identity as ELF Writers A number of scholars in the field of fan studies (Fiske 1992; Jenkins 1992a; Becque 2012; Coker 2012; Jwa 2012) reiterate the link between fan productions and the author’s own life experience, which is embedded and combined with the source material in the creation of new readings and interpretations. In the corpus, it was seen that writers would draw from other interests—fandom-related or otherwise—or real-life experiences to develop their stories. Crossover stories mark the writers’ affiliation with multiple fandoms and alternative universes for a cast of pre-existing characters that may be created to fit with the writer’s real-life interests and experiences. For example, one of the writers, a medical student, moved the characters of a manga set in nineteenth-century England to a modern-day American hospital, which allowed her to produce a story with detailed and accurate medical information. Experiences matured through travels and international mobility may also be included in the stories, as is the case for the writer who, having lived in Hungary, provided her readers with

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additional historical information about the country to guide them through a chapter of her story centred on a Hungarian character. The same applies to language use in the stories: the writers draw from their linguistic repertoires, embedding elements from other languages and varieties in their stories that fulfil specific functions and mark the writer as a member of a specific group of fans and as an expert of a specific field or a specific language. Skills in multiple languages are valued in fan fiction writing, as the cosmopolitan nature of fandom is considered a positive trait by its international, multilingual participants (Black 2006, 2008). This is demonstrated by the effort fans put into using multiple languages in the review section to show solidarity to other members, despite the established choice of English as a language of communication. As Black states about a non-native fan fiction writer in her study, “using different languages in her fan fiction texts, the multilingual nature of her texts becomes another crux of interaction and dialogic negotiation for her and a transnational group of fans” (Black 2008, 86). Plurilingual competence in the globalised, superdiverse universe of fandom is therefore seen as an additional asset by the audience, and not a cause of interference in the primary language text that may hinder the enjoyment of the story. As a result, the use of plurilingual resources does not mark fans as outsiders to the NS community, using other languages to fill in gaps in their knowledge of English, but rather marks them as knowledgeable members of an international community with specific linguistic skills that add to the value of their production within a linguistically super-diverse group. Black’s young immigrants to the United States and our ELF writers “are able to discursively position themselves as articulate members in a pluralistic space that fosters a positive sense of self” (ibid., 96), and be recognised as popular and appreciated creators of fiction rather than permanently deficient learners of a foreign language.

5.9.6 Suggestions for further research The exploitation of plurilingual resources was chosen as a focus of this investigation; however, the complexity and the multiple facets of fan fiction in its ELF dimension may offer a number of starting points for further research on the topic that would add valuable insight into written ELF. Additional ethnographic research, such as that carried out by Black (2008), would help shed more light on the linguistic choices made by ELF fan fiction writers in their texts and the reasons and purposes underlying these choices. Moreover, interviews with writers could help gain a better

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understanding of what it means to be an ELF writer in an international super-diverse context and how this experience shapes the author’s perception of the self in relation to their status as an NNS of English. Ethnographic research would equally provide further information about the writers’ linguistic repertoire and how it was acquired and shaped by their experiences in and out of fandom. Investigation of other linguistic aspects relating to ELF would also increase the amount of ELF data available and contribute to the everdeveloping research exploring lingua franca communication in various contexts. Manual scanning of the corpus showed that certain traditional features associated with ELF from the early days of research—zero marking on the third person plural (Seidlhofer 2004; Breiteneder 2005); use of articles; redundant prepositions (Seidlhofer 2004); use of the progressive tense (Ranta 2006); and increased explicitness (Mauranen 2007, 2010; Seidlhofer 2011)—were noticeable in the corpus as well. Research on formulaic language (Metsä-Ketelä 2006; Prodromou 2008; Baumgarten and House 2010; Mauranen 2012), including idiomatic expressions (Pitzl 2009, 2012) from a written ELF perspective, would help investigate potential emerging patterns of use in written edited texts involving a lower degree of interaction. So far, the major published studies that address written edited ELF texts involve, respectively, BELF in corporate websites (Poppi 2012) and blogging practices (Vettorel 2014), with other studies currently underway (Mauranen’s work on the WrELFA corpus; Carey 2013a, 2013c, 2013d; Mauranen 2013). It appears that ELF studies, up until now primarily concerned with spoken interaction, are branching out towards the internet, where written, partly edited, and/or unedited ELF uses are more likely to be found, rather than in official print media where gatekeeping occurs and texts produced by NNSs are edited by NSs before publication. A notable exception to this tendency is the Journal of English as a Lingua Franca, which does not require contributors to consult native proofreaders before article submission. Therefore, there is still a lot to be said in regards to written ELF, both in terms of traditional and computer-mediated, monologic and highly interactional, writing.

CONCLUSION

This study has focused on the international aspect of fan fiction writing from a linguistic point of view, investigating the exploitation of plurilingual resources in a cross-cultural environment where cosmopolitanism is valued among its participants (Black 2008; Leppänen et al. 2009). It was decided to explore the issue from an ELF perspective, highlighting the role of English as the primary shared tool of communication for fans who aim at engaging in social and creative practices with like-minded people all over the world. The creation of a specific corpus representative of NNSs of English participating in manga and anime-inspired creative writing online allowed the exploration of a number of aspects linked to the use of written ELF for leisure and creative purposes. The selection of the criteria for the compilation and subsequent analysis of the corpus was carried out by taking into account the specificities of both fandom and English as a lingua franca. The first two chapters led the reader through the theoretical frameworks related to these two aspects, providing the necessary background information and finally bringing the two together as postmodern phenomena inextricably linked to the globalisation processes that are still underway in the contemporary era. Particular attention was drawn to the similarities between these two fields, and to how, thanks to these common elements, it is possible to ascribe them to a common model that validates the exploration of the vast universe of fandom from an ELF perspective. Both fandom and ELF are relatively new fields of research: academic interest in fandom started growing after the publication of seminal books on the subject in 1992 (Jenkins 1992; Lewis 1992; Bacon-Smith 1992), whereas interest in ELF, the seed of which was planted in the 1990s (Widdowson 1994; Firth 1996), flourished in the early 2000s (Jenkins 2000; House 2002a, 2002b, 2003; Seidlhofer 2001; Mauranen 2003). Both phenomena have grown and expanded as a result of globalisation processes: the transnational flows of people and information that characterise the contemporary era have problematised a number of traditional tenets in social studies, linguistics, and sociolinguistics. While ELF is by default international, fandom became internationalised over time as access to the internet became widely available and fostered the creation of virtual groups for interpersonal interaction for professional,

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educational, and personal purposes. The variety of communicative contexts and settings as well as the linguacultural backgrounds involved in ELF and fandom support the definition of both concepts as super-diverse (Vertovec 2007; Cogo 2012b) and hybrid (Seidlhofer 2011; Herring 2004, 2007), which again characterise them as postmodern phenomena. These qualities of fandom and ELF, alongside the collapse of spatial boundaries, were reason to ascribe both phenomena to the rhizome model proposed by Deleuze and Guattari (1987). The structure of the rhizome cannot be conceived as a hierarchy, as was case for the traditional arborescent view of knowledge: on the contrary, the rhizome is not linear, but is everevolving and ever-changing, concretising into bulbs and tubers interconnected with one another. Fandom and ELF are not emanations of a higher unity, but are more appropriately describable as a multiplicity of individual emanations that are inextricably connected to each other. These elements of the rhizome are open and modifiable, reflecting the circumstances of ELF events and fan communities: both are performative multiplicities, untraceable back to a hierarchically superior One. Indeed, the ensemble of fans and ELF speakers may be defined in terms of imagined communities (Anderson 1991). The traditional notion of community is not applicable here, as fandom and ELF are not geographically-bound, linguistically homogeneous groupings, but rather constitute interest-based communities where a heterogeneous variety of participants gather to discuss and act in relation to the shared interest. Imagined communities are constructed upon a sense of affinity and membership shared by participants, who foster their identification with the community through interaction with other members. While ELF and fandom may be conceived as amorphous entities (Mauranen 2012, 18), smaller, circumscribed groups emerge from these imagined communities, both online and offline, that are self-regulating. In other words, each community remains interconnected with others, but interaction and membership, as well as idioms of practice (Gershon 2010), are negotiated within the group, in consonance with Deleuze and Guattari’s principle of multiplicity (1987). Where ELF is concerned, language use in these communities is negotiated among members to ensure that intelligibility is maintained and successful communication is achieved; however, when ELF encounters occur within communicative contexts that have their own registers (e.g. business and academia), members are required to combine on-the-go meaning negotiation with adherence to the idioms of practice of their community. This is also the case of fandom, which, with its variety of social and creative practices spanning multiple CMC modes, requires its member to be familiar with related language and, in addition, with the

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distinctive vocabulary of individual fandoms and their sub-sections (e.g. Wakefield 2001; Kneen 2012). Language in motion (Blommaert 2010; Pennycook 2012; Blommaert and Backus 2013), such as ELF, changes and adapts according to the needs and goals of its speakers in a given event. Furthermore, languages move outside the spatial boundaries of national borders and alongside information flows in the digital globalised society. Transnational speakers and nomadic readers (De Certeau 1984) also move within the imagined community—the rhizome—itself as they travel from bulb to tuber, shaping and re-shaping them, drawing connections and creating new bulbs from old stems, designing and changing their map according to the principle of cartography (Deleuze and Guattari 1987). ELF-speaking fans online negotiate social relations and their roles as producers of creative content by exploiting all the linguistic resources at their disposal, according to the communicative context or practice they are engaging with. In addition to their linguacultural background, they bring their sociocultural repertoires (Blommaert 2008) into the communication, drawing from them the resources they need to effectively complete the interactional event or their text-based product in these super-diverse environments. The exploitation of a user’s sociocultural repertoire may involve both varieties of the same language—text messaging language, for example— or different languages. Specifically, we can speak of “bits and pieces” (Jørgensen 2008, 168) of these languages, as users do not need to be fluent in a specific language to use them. These heteroglossic practices (Leppänen 2012) were found to be not uncommon in fandom, as the fans’ diverse backgrounds and repertoires are valued and seen as an asset by other members of fandom (Black 2006; 2008; Leppänen et al. 2009). Depending on the fandom, interspersing discourse with elements drawn from other languages might be considered as a marker of affiliation to the community. The choice to investigate manga and anime-inspired fan fiction was indeed related to this aspect of plurilingual practices in fandom. As the chosen texts for inspiration stem from Japanese culture, the Japanese linguistic elements in writer-reader communication and the stories themselves may play an important role as markers of affiliation to the manga/anime fandom and as authenticity devices in the narrative texts, in relation to both setting and characterisation. While this study was primarily concerned with heteroglossic practices in the stories themselves, a section was dedicated to the analysis of the fan fiction paratext as well as reader reviews. Analysis of these aspects of the fan fiction phenomenon showed that, despite being a primarily monologic genre, writers maintain an ongoing dialogue with their readers—and

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fellow fans—through paratextual elements, where they include, among other things, metaliterary comments about their narrative and linguistic choices as well as reactions to reader reviews. Such paratextual elements incorporate uses of languages other than English. These contributed to the construction of the writer’s identity as a fan, and to the promotion of social rapport with their readers. Findings showed that use of Japanese is related primarily to selfidentification, signalling affiliation to the anime/manga fandom and creating affinity with their potential readers. On the other hand, uses of the writer’s L1 or other LNs has suggested a social function as the main role fulfilled by code-switching in this context: namely, showing affiliation to a specific reader or group of readers and/or signalling them as the intended addressee of a particular message. Reviews showed the cooperative and supportive nature of both fandom and ELF; although the writers incorporate, in the paratext of their stories, disclaimers about their selfperceived competence—or lack thereof—in English, the attitudes identified in the reviews were for the majority positive and encouraging. Even when non-nativeness was addressed, criticism was mediated trough hedging and face-saving strategies, underlining the cooperative environment of fandom and contributing to positioning writers as successful and appreciated members of their community. Similarly, switches performed social functions in reader reviews, expressing affiliation to a specific linguacultural background or solidarity with the writer, usually through use of interjections and conversational routines, as well as membership to manga/anime fandom through the use of token Japanese linguistic elements. The analysis of the narrative texts showed that exploitation of the writers’ plurilingual resources varied in both type and function according the context and setting of the stories. Indeed, Japanese appeared to occur mostly as an authenticity device in the stories, reminding readers through the insertion of Japanese linguistic elements—mostly nouns, interjections and honorifics—that both the setting and the characters are Japanese. At the same time, they mark the writer as a knowledgeable member of the fan community and the source texts. Use of other languages was noticed more frequently in stories involving international casts of characters and nonJapanese geographical settings. While using plurilingual elements as an authenticity device constitutes the most common function in the stories, foreign-language elements may still be ascribed to one of the three main functions identified in the corpus—narrative, pragmatic, and social— which often overlap. Narrative functions, which include code-switching as an authenticity device, also include instances of heteroglossia that may be useful to advancing plots or relationships between characters. This is the

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case for example with Japanese honorifics, the pragmatics of which provides information about interpersonal relations and their evolution. Honorific language therefore also fulfils social and pragmatic functions, which are the other two main groups of functions identified in the stories. This highlights the complexity and multiple aspects of code-switching uses in fan fiction; it is often not possible to ascribe one specific switch to only one function or groups of functions. The grammatical nature of the switches identified was helpful in the analysis, as it allowed additional observations to be made regarding the role and nature of switches in the corpus. The high frequency of single-word items such as nouns and interjections, or multi-word elements like conversational routines, suggests a symbolic aspect to language use, as the writers’ goal is not to convey significant meaning via the switches as much as complement and enhance the story through the means at their disposal. In addition, the choice to use single words or basic formulae, as already attested in ELF (Klimpfinger 2007, 2009; Cogo 2009), may be related to the need to maintain the intelligibility and enjoyment of the story for readers, who have very diverse linguacultural backgrounds and may not be familiar with Japanese and the other languages writers use in their work. Plurilingual phenomena remain however a noticeable occurrence in fan fiction writing, especially in relation to Japanese pop culture, and the complexity of its multiple uses and function mirrors the variety and contingent nature of ELF communication. While this study has attempted to give a detailed account of the linguistic heteroglossic practices of fans as they participate in the production of narrative texts in a super-diverse environment, it has only scratched the surface in terms of what the analysis of such data may contribute to ELF research. Plurilingual phenomena in combination with fandom are only two among the perspectives and contexts of analysis that may contribute to shedding light on how ELF users engage in social and creative practices in English in a leisure environment, and how they construct their identities as active members in international, interest-based communities.

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WEBSITES

http://archiveofourown.org/ AO3. A multi-fandom fan fiction archive. www.deviantart.com/ DeviantART is a community where artists, including fans, can upload and showcase their work. www.dreamwidth.org Dreamwidth is a popular blogging platform among fans. www.fanfiction.net A massive multi-fandom fan fiction archive. http://fanlore.org/ A wiki site that collects information about fans and fandom. www.flickr.com/ Flickr. An image-hosting site that allows photographers to showcase their work. www.gossamer.org/ Gossamer. The X-Files fan fiction archive. www.helsinki.fi/elfa/elfacorpus Website of the English as a Lingua Franca in Academic Settings (ELFA) project at the University of Helsinki. http://hetalia.wikia.com Wiki website dedicated to Hetalia: Axis Powers franchise: Hetalia is a Japanese webcomic, manga and anime. www.imdb.com The Internet Movie DatabBase. http://www.jisho.org/ Denshi Jisho is an online Japanese-English online dictionary, based on data from the WWWJDIC: Online Japanese Dictionary Service Project, accessible at http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/cgi-bin/wwwjdic.cgi?1C.

238

Websites

http://linee.info/en/linee/home2.html Website of the Languages in a Network of European Excellence (LINEE) research project, focusing on the investigation of linguistic diversity. http://naruto.wikia.com Wiki website dedicated to the Naruto franchise. Naruto is a Japanese manga/anime. www.oed.com Online version of the Oxford English Dictionary. http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/micase/ Website of the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE) project at the University of Michigan. http://ranma.wikia.com/ Wiki website dedicated to the Ranma 1/2 franchise. Ranma 1/2 is a Japanese manga/anime. https://transformativeworks.org/ Website of the Organization for Transformative Works (OTW). They manage the Fanlore wiki alongside other projects and they advocate for the right of fans to engage in remixing practices without fear of legal retaliation. www.tumblr.com Tumblr. is a popular microblogging platform. http://turtlepedia.wikia.com/ Wiki website dedicated to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (TMNT) franchise. TMNT is an American comic/animated series that has also spanned five live-action movies and a live-action series. http://tvtropes.org/ Wiki websites collecting tropes found in popular culture texts from a variety of media. www.univie.ac.at/voice Website of the Vienna-Oxford International Corpus of English (VOICE) Project at the University of Vienna. http://www.urbandictionary.com/ Urban Dictionary is an online, user-made dictionary that is mainly constituted of entries relating to slang and internet phenomena, including fandom.

INDEX

Aca/Fen, 16, 97–98 acafans. See also Aca/Fen accommodation strategies, 50–51 addressee specification. See specifying an addressee adjacency pairs, 176 alternative reading strategies: alternative universe, 29, 30, 195, 202; crossover, 29, 86, 111, 140, 184, 195, 202; expanding the timeline, 28; genre shifting, 29, 80; moral realignment, 29; personalization, 29; recontextualization, 28; refocalization, 29 anime, 43, 44, 77, 89–91, 113–14, 189–93 AU. See alternative universe authenticity device, 164, 167–68, 207–8 Author’s Notes. See fan fiction beta reader, 83, 86, 127 bilingualism, 102, 105, 111, 114 blog, 25–6, 59, 70, 76, 82, 92; LiveJournal, 25–27, 82, 88, 92 blogging. See blogs centre and periphery, 63 characterisation, 89, 202, 207 closing formulae, 129, 135, 150, 198 CMC. See computer-mediated communication code-switching, 55–57, 102–5, 114, 129, 194; alternational, 104, 130, 172–74; and ELF, 55–57, 106– 10; flagging, 139–41, 159; functions, 56, 103–4; insertional, 104, 150, 160–68, 195;

intelligibility, 166, 201; interjections, 150, 175–81, 198; intersentential, 150, 178; intrasentential, 150; online, 110– 14; translation, 141–47, 201; versus borrowing, 168–69 collocations, 160; see hybrid forms community, 17, 20; imagined, 73– 76, 146, 206; interpretive, 16; membership, 18, 20, 47; of interest, 17, 194; of practice, 75– 76, 146; speech, 66, 70, 73; traditional, 5, 73; virtual, 5, 19– 21, 67, 69, 75, 194 computer-mediated communication, 23–25, 59, 68–70, 110, 124, 139; asynchronous, 24, 77, 110, 135; mode, 60, 67–72; synchronous, 24, 77, 110 cooperative imperative, 47–48 corpus, 170; ACE, 2; BYU–BNC, 170–71; COCA, 170–71; ELFA, 2, 48; fan fiction, 5, 76, 85, 98; VOICE, 2, 48; WrELFA, 3, 58, 204 cross–language influence, 158 cuisine, 160–61; see Japanese elements deterritorialisation, 62, 63, 64, 196 deviantART, 71, 88 dialogicity. See non–native authors dialogue vs. narration, 197–99 dictionary, 150; see Oxford English Dictionary, 151, 153–54, 170– 71; Urban Dictionary, 151, 153– 56 discourse markers, 53, 150, 179–81 discourse reflexivity, 53

240 discussion forums, 11, 24, 31, 151 donor language, 170, 175–76 ELF, 1, 5, 44–5; BELF, 57; and CMC, 57–60; see code– switching and ELF; definition, 45; features, 48–9; function over form, 50; pedagogical implications, 2; working language, 120–23 Entdifferenzierung, 63 ethics of online research, 93–95 exclamations, 109, 150, 179, 181, 198 Facebook, 70, 110 fan, 3, 9, 12–15; as nomadic reader, 34; as textual poacher, 9, 16, 33 fan art, 30–31; banner, 31; icon, 31; photo manipulation, 30 fan club, 22 fan community, 17–18; membership, 20–21, 74, 101, 113–14, 164, 206 fan fiction, 3, 32–33, 76–77, 79– 81, 83, 119, 136; archives, 82; Author’s Notes, 81, 92, 119, 134–35, 142, 198; disclaiming expressions, 91–2, 125; femslash, 84; gen, 80; genres, 80–81, 88; header, 149; het, 80; paratext, 6, 119–20, 136, 146, 197, 199; reviews, 120, 123–31; slash, 80, 81; songfic, 81, 174, 195 fan productivity, 15–16; enunciative, 15, 22, 27; semiotic, 15; textual, 16 fan subs, 41–44 fan talk, 15, 17, 22, 27, 87, 136, 169 fan videos, 30–31, 101 fandom, 3, 10, 12–13, 146; as a rhizome, 70–72; pedagogical implications, 35–38, 132; shared linguistic resources, 21, 74, 84 FanFiction.net, 76, 80, 82–83, 86– 88, 119–20, 123 Fanlore (website), 21, 30, 82

Index fanzine, 3, 22, 23; fictionzine, 23; letterzine, 23 farewells, 177 filking, 32 fillers, 179, 181 flame war, 24 flaming, 24, 125 formulaic expressions, 132, 179 fragmentation, 17, 65–66, 72; see identity globalization, 3, 4, 12, 61–62, 65, 72 greetings, 111, 129, 132, 150, 175– 77, 179, 198 heteroglossia, 115–17, 130, 174, 194, 207 humour, 157 hybrid forms, 151, 157, 160; collocations, 160, 191; mixed compounds, 156–57; mixed derivational form, 156–57 hybridity, 2, 62, 65, 72; linguistic, 90, 156–57; of fandom, 71 ICL2E. See fandom; see pedagogical implications identity, 54, 59, 83–84, 112, 114; as writers, 6, 80, 119, 134, 146, 149, 202; bilingual, 57, 114; fragmentation, 70, 101; in fan fiction, 141, 163; see signalling culture; in fandom, 15, 25, 31– 32, 133, 149, 197, 198, 200; multilingual, 109; online, 24, 69–71; plurilingual, 56 idiomatic language, 53–54; remetaphorization, 54 idioms of practice, 60, 70, 72, 146, 206 imagined audience, 167 individual multilingual repertoires, 55 intelligibility, 201–2 intertextuality, 33–35, 116, 165 Italian, 140, 144, 16–61, 165, 168, 188

Exploring Plurilingualism in Fan Fiction: ELF Users as Creative Writers 241 Japanese elements, 130, 150, 208; food and drink, 150, 160; honorifics, 150, 157, 182–86, 197–98; martial arts, 150, 154, 160, 162, 190; onomatopoeia, 180; religion and mythology, 150, 160, 162; token Japanese, 113, 131, 164 L1, 2, 55–57, 61, 100, 106, 108, 109, 113, 124, 129–30, 136, 138, 140, 165, 169, 177, 194, 200, 208, see language choice language choice, 60, 103, 112 language fetishism, 164 language ownership, 63, 126 linguacultural backgrounds, 106, 108 LN, 2, 55–57, 61, 106, 108, 113, 129–30, 140, 165, 169, 188, 194, 200, 208, see language choice mailing list, 25 manga, 43, 44, 77, 89–91, 114, 190– 92 map, 65, 71, 156, 196, see rhizome metalinguistic awareness, 137–39 metalinguistic comments, 124, 139, 200 metrolingualism, 115–6, 194 microblog, 25, 70, 82; Tumblr., 25– 27, 82, 88 microblogging. See microblog MMORPG, 36 morphological assimilation, 168–72 morphological productivity. See word-formation processes multicompetence, 106 multilingualism, 57, 61, 105, 108, 111, 115; online, 7, 110 multiliteracy, 35–38 mutual intelligibility, 47 narrative function. See plurilingual practices native speaker/non-native speaker dichotomy, 1, 46–47, 56, 132, 136 New Englishes, 63

nonce formations, 158 non-native authors, 85, 90, 125, 132, 197, 202; disclaiming expressions, 92; peer evaluation, 124–28; relationship with readers, 6, 119, 134, 198 non-standard language, 125, 126, 132, 138–39, 156, 158–59, 188 OED. See Oxford English Dictionary otaku, 90, 114, 155 paratext. See fan fiction participatory culture, 9, 10, 16, 27, 36, 128 perceptions of English, 91–93 phraseology, 53 place names, 152 plurilingual practices, 61, 65, 106, 107, 110, 149, 196; narrative function, 6, 144, 163, 178, 200– 201; pragmatic function, 6, 177, 199–200; social function, 6, 197–99 plurilingual repertoires, 55–57, 194 polylingual languaging, 114–16, 130, 169, 194 postmodernism, 62, 63, 66; and ELF, 4, 62-67, 72; and fandom, 4, 67-68, 70, 72 pragmatic function. See plurilingual practices pre-emptive strategy, 159 Psychological Sense of Community, 18–21, 75, See community; Sense of Community Index, 18 reader, 129–32, 124–28 regularization, 51 remixing, 27, 149, 196 repair strategies, 51 researcher as insider, 96–98 reviews, 6, 123–28, 197; evaluation of English; see non-native authors; metalinguistic comments, 124; plurilingualism, 129–31

242 rhizome, 5, 64–65, 68–69, 70, 71, 112, 146, 156, 196, 206, 207; cartography, 69, 71, 156, 196, 207; see map RPGs, 32 Sense of Virtual Community, 19– 21; see community shared linguistic resources, 137; see fandom shipper, 71 signalling culture, 57, 108–9, 129, 175, 197, 198; in fan fiction, 140, 163, 164, 165, 167, 175, 177, 180, 189, 198–89 social deixis, 182, 186; see Japanese elements social function. See plurilingual practices sociocultural repertoires, 72, 112, 134 sociolinguistics of mobility, 64 solidarity, 54, 109, 129, 130–31, 146–47, 198

Index specifying an addressee, 57, 108, 129, 189, 198 Standard English, 63 super-diversity, 65, 72, 76–77, 106, 174, 194 symbolic use of English, 131–2, 149, 164 tag-switches, 175; see codeswitching territorial imperative, 47–48 titles and terms of address, 186–89, 198; see Japanese elements translocality, 61–62, 119, 196 Twitter, 70 UD. See dictionary virtual language, 107, 158–60 word-formation processes, 52, 158– 60; analogic compounding, 159; class conversion, 159; compounding, 156, 159 Wordsmith Tools, 183, 185 World Englishes, 63 zine. See fanzine