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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 1294

Part of Session 185: Superdiversity and digital literacy practices (Other abstracts in this session)

Emoticons as diacritics of superdiversity

Authors: van de Sande, Maaike (1,2); Juffermans, Kasper (1,3)
Submitted by: Juffermans, Kasper (Hamburg University, Germany)

This paper adopts a descriptive discourse analytical approach to emoticons as used in the online teenage community “Asian and Proud” on the Dutch social network site Hyves. The first 100 posts of four discussion threads, identified as showing rich usage of emoticons, have been used to form a small corpus to investigate the meaning and variation of emoticons in digital conversation. We explore the use of emoticons as diacritics of superdiversity.

As a result of changing patterns of migration since the 1990s and the coinciding development of the Internet and mobile phones, we are entering into a new post-multicultural order, commonly referred to as superdiversity. One of the characteristics of this new order is the emergence of new groupings and identities which are conceptualised at higher scale-levels than the default identity options available to the previous generation (e.g., Asianness vs. Chineseness). New media, and social network sites in particular, play an important role in the creation of these “superidentities” as they are capable of connecting large numbers of people across localities and are organized as “communities of interest”. We focus on emoticons as micro-analytical features (diacritics) of language use that are emblematic for the creation and articulation of these new upscaled transnational identities.

The Asian and Proud community serves as an online platform for mainly second and third generation Asian-Dutch youngsters, i.e. young people in the Netherlands from families with Asian migration backgrounds (from HK, China, Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, etc.). What brings them together is their shared sense of an inherited Asian identity, and their interest in discussing, (re)discovering and (re)constructing their Asianness together with other young Dutch Asians. Their main language of communication is Dutch and only minimal multilingualism can be observed: mostly switches to English and occasional display of Chinese and other Asian languages. Emoticons are widely used throughout this community: both in typographic and pictographic style [compare :-) with ©] and both in Western and Eastern style [compare :-) with ^_^].  Used alongside the more common Western style emoticons, Eastern style emoticons seem to function – whether consciously or unconsciously – as language-independent cultural resources that allow for subtle articulations of post-national Asian identities. On the basis of the material posted on the forums, we find that members embody complex polycentric communicative and identity repertoires in which the originally Japanese emoticons (kaomoji) play a subtle role in “authenticating” their Asianness. At the same time, we observe that Asian emoticons increasingly appear in mainstream media, which suggests that Eastern style emoticons also transcend Asian identity and are part of a more generally shared social process.

Diacritics are subtle, distinctive markers that appear above (or below) the letter and provide cues of interpretation/pronunciation. The diacritics of superdiversity are microscopic elements of social or linguistic order that point at broad, ongoing cultural processes of diversification. The appearance of Eastern style emoticons in Dutch social network media points at one or both of (a) the emergence of new Asian identities in Europe; and (b) the growing popularity of Asian popular culture in Europe.