ABSTRACT
Group 2009). This meant that the Japanese language was now used in forums different from any previously experienced, such as email, chat rooms, bulletin boards and web pages. Some of these – web sites, for example – were relatively formal in nature. Others, however, hybridized speech and writing, incorporating the features of the former into the medium of the latter with interesting and sometimes controversial results. As Randall (2002: 2) puts it, “Internet users are speaking with their fingers.” Many of the linguistic features of Japanese computer-mediated communication (CMC) parallel those found in English, while others are specific to Japanese because they manipulate the orthography in ways unavailable to alphabet writing systems. Just as Danet (2001) identified non-standard use of punctuation and spelling along with representation of emotion through textual innovation as features of English CMC, so Nishimura (2003) found similar strategies on bulletin boards on Japanese fan sites, although naturally the differing orthographies necessitated different approaches: where English might use asterisks either side of a word to indicate emphasis, for example, the same effect was achieved in Japanese by substituting katakana script for the normal hiragana. Both languages made heavy use of emoticons, known in Japanese as kaomoji (face characters) or emoji (picture characters). Emoticons, Randall (2002: 5) notes, are attempts to represent the body, whereas informalities in punctuation, grammar and lexicon attempt to represent the spoken word. Together, they aim to give the impression that the sender of the message is speaking to the recipient even though the medium is text. In Nishimura (2004), a study of postings on unmoderated community forum website 2 Channeru, however, we find non-standard usages of script which stray much further from the accepted conventions than those just described. They include a kind of kanji punning enabled by the many homophones in Japanese, where kanji are used for their sounds to spell out words with the same pronunciation but different meanings, e.g. 串 (kushi, skewer) is used to represent the word purokushii (proxy), which would normally be written out as プロクシー in katakana. Kanji were also used phonetically for the sake of brevity: e.g. 藁 (wara, rice straw) was substituted for 笑 (wara, stem of warau, to laugh) to indicate “sneering laughter.” When phonetic scripts were being used, particularly in katakana, symbols representing different sounds but having almost identical shapes would be substituted for each other, e.g. ソ (so) forン (n), creating a new word sumaso for “sorry” instead of its usual shortened form suman. And finally, inadvertent typos were often taken up and used in fun by others, thereby perpetuating them in the group’s usage. Sophisticated language play of this kind is found quite often among members of online communities. As other forms of online communication emerged during the first decade of the present century, so the use of Japanese online further widened. Japan’s most popular social networking site Mixi was started in 2004; My Space Japan rolled out a Japanese-language service in 2006. An April 2007 survey found Japanese, accounting for 37 percent of all postings, to be the top language of the blogosphere (Sifry 2007), possibly because Japanese bloggers seemed to be writing
shorter, more frequent blog posts and using their cell phones to post them. Most recently, Twitter, a real-time short messaging service, launched its Japanese language service in 2008 – the first time Twitter has been made available in a language other than English. In Japan’s case, the major factor enabling a high degree of participation in these activities has been the mobile Internet, i.e. Internet access via cell phone (keitai), and it is to a discussion of the language of cell phone emails that I now turn.
