FROM CODE-SWITCHING TO LOANWORD: NEW INDEXICALITIES AND FUNCTIONS OF JAPANESE “DESU” IN AN ENGLISH ONLINE COMMUNITY By CHRIS SPRINGFIELD UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA 2019 1 TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT .......................................................................................................................... 3 INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................................. 4 REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE ....................................................................................... 8 METHODOLOGY ............................................................................................................. 24 FINDINGS ......................................................................................................................... 27 Gauging Language Ideologies of “Desu” in Two Communities: 4chan’s Worksafe Requests Board ............................................................................... 27 Gauging... Communities: SwampCon Anime Convention Community ....................... 29 Analyzing Instances of “Dess” on 4chan, as Archived on archived.moe..................... 31 1. Confessional/Evaluative “Dess” without Anime/Manga context ................. 37 2. ...With direct Anime/Manga context ............................................................. 45 3. ...In response to Anime/Manga context ........................................................ 49 4. Further Considerations ................................................................................. 53 SUMMARY AND DISCUSSION ..................................................................................... 56 REFERENCE LIST ............................................................................................................ 63 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS .................................................................................................. 67 2 ABSTRACT This thesis examines the use and function of “desu” within an English online community, 4chan. It establishes the usage of “desu” as a loanword in English, both on 4chan and in anime/manga fan communities, and proposes that the indexical relationships between “desu” and these communities have motivated English speakers within those communities to adopt it as a discourse marker. A brief description of 4chan, a CMC context in which anonymity is preferred, is given, and it is argued that the indexical qualities of “desu” are leveraged by posters on the site to establish their status as experienced users, and to reference anime/manga and their fan communities, through the term’s indexical link to those contexts and communities. The results of a survey of 4chan users and members of an anime/manga fan community regarding their experience with the term and the ideologies they hold pertaining to its usage are presented, and posts on 4chan containing a variant of “desu” are analyzed and categorized, offering an insight into how speakers think about and use the term. 3 INTRODUCTION This thesis aims to understand the use and function of “desu,” which is argued to have become a loanword in English, within the online community 4chan. This research focuses on the indexical qualities tying “desu” to 4chan and how and why speakers in that community leverage these indexical features to perform desirable identities on the site. Usage of “desu,” which I will also argue to constitute loanword usage, within anime and manga fan communities, and how the association of “desu” with those communities adds further indexical relations to the term, will also be considered. 4chan1, which describes itself at www.4chan.org/faq as a “simple image-based bulletin board” and “primarily an imageboard” (4chan, 2019), is a site hosting what Bernstein et al. (2011) call a “large-scale, anonymous, and ephemeral community (Bernstein et al., 2011, p. 50)” with a focus on sharing images and participating in discussion accompanied by images. The ephemeral nature of the site is due to the way in which information is presented and preserved (Bernstein et al., 2011; Manivannan, 2012). The site is divided into “boards,” each of which houses content pertaining to a particular interest (e.g. /ck/, “Cooking,” or /trv/, “Travel”). The boards are composed of “threads,” which contain an original post and replies to that post. When a new thread is created it appears at the top of the board, pushing older threads down. When a user posts in an existing thread it returns to the top of the board 1 The site has recently split into 4chan.org and 4channel.org, with the 4channel.org domain used for “work safe” boards—This distinction has no bearing on my analysis, and henceforth both domains will be referred to under the collective name of 4chan.org or “4chan.” 4 until the thread reaches a threshold number of posts, in which case it is no longer moved up. Each board has an allotted capacity of threads, and threads at the bottom of the board’s catalog are deleted as new content is created2; thus, anonymous users do not generally carry identities with them from post to post or from thread to thread, and the contents of any given thread are not preserved on-site forever, with the exception of long-lasting “stickied” threads3. On October 31, 2015, several “word filters4” were implemented on the site, one of which automatically converts the term “tbh,” an acronym for “to be honest,” into “desu,” originally a copula in Japanese5 (Bibliotheca Anonoma, 2018). The word filter works without notifying the user that their post has been altered before it is displayed on the site, and as of the time of writing this thesis there is no indication of the word filter’s existence on 4chan’s FAQ page. However, there are users who are familiar with this word filter, and these posters can directly or indirectly reference its existence: “desu” thus becomes not only an automatically enforced part of the site, but a reference point in the shared culture of site users. 2 Further explanation of 4chan’s organization and culture can be found in Bernstein et al. (2011), Manivannan (2012) and Pajunen (2017). 3 Described on www.4chan.org/faq as “posts that are stuck (hence ‘sticky/stickied’) to the top of a board's index page... [and] can only be stuck by moderators (4chan, 2019).” 4 This was not the first implementation of word filters on the site (Bibliotheca Anonoma, 2018). 5 4chan’s relationship to the Japanese language is not arbitrary: 4chan originally started as an anime fan community of sorts and was inspired by the Japanese forum Futaba Channel, and on September 21, 2015, shortly before several word filters with Japanese terms were implemented, it was announced that the Japanese creator of 2channel, Hiroyuki Nishimura, had taken up the role of site administrator (Bibliotheca Anonoma, 2018; 4chan, 2019). 5 In this thesis, I argue that users of the website 4chan.org have adopted “desu” to leverage its indexical qualities pertaining to the site, and that in doing so they align themselves with language ideologies which present proper (according to community standards) usage of the community-specific linguistic repertoire as a trait of experienced users, establishing and re-establishing their credentials as such a user (Bernstein et al., 2011; Manivannan, 2012). To avoid confounding data resulting from 4chan’s word filter, I analyze usage of “dess,” which I assume indicates both a deliberate reference to “desu” and a decision to make the deliberate (i.e., not enforced by a word filter) nature of the reference visible. In the course of this argument, I claim that “desu” has become a loanword within certain English-speaking communities, particularly the anime and manga fandom and the userbase of 4chan. I examine research on enregisterment, indexicality, identity, CMC, site culture, loanword formation, memes and usage of “desu” within the anime and manga fandom, and present new research gauging ideologies relating to “desu” within the 4chan user community and an anime/manga fan community, as well as an analysis of the presented posts in relation to those ideologies and theories of identity and indexicality. In addition to presenting what I believe to be the first analysis of “desu” as a loanword in English, this research examines an unusual process of loanword formation and emphasizes the value of indexicality and identity performance to the linguistic choices by speakers through the study of a term with little lexical meaning. It is my belief that as the internet continues to grow as a site for interpersonal communication, there is an 6 accompanying growing need for research into the language used on the internet—and it is my hope that this thesis will contribute to addressing that need. 7 REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE Focusing on the spread and enregisterment6 of Received Pronunciation, Agha (2003) discusses how the spread of a register is affected by metadiscourse and “role alignment” by receivers of the metadiscursive messages—These receivers can adjust their own speech to align with ideologies of language which attach certain values to those registers, thus moving the receivers’ self-image toward the set of “social personae” linked to that speech (Agha, 2004, p. 243). Agha argues that the transmission of these messages is a “speech chain” between senders and receivers. The position of receiver in one link of this chain can include many people collectively, as in “public sphere discourses,” and the parties do not necessarily need to be present in the same location or at the same time, and may even not know one