Digital writing, recreated orality, and identity: domestication and exoticization of multilingual speech on Chinese social media
-
Feifei Zhou
,
Chuanlin Liao
and
Liu Yang
Abstract
With their access to an unprecedented amount of streamed multimodal, multilingual content, it becomes increasingly common among Chinese social media users to translate and transcribe multilingual speech via the digital writing function of bullet comments (superimposed writing on a moving screen played simultaneously with the video). In this article, we look at “Konger” (“intentional mishearing”) to offer a timely discussion of amateur writing/literacy practice afforded by digital technologies. Leveraging unique affordances of Chinese characters (unlike alphabetic writing), when transcribing multilingual speech (from foreign speakers and Chinese dialect speakers) users deliberately select characters that deviate from their “original” meanings, often in unexpected, humorous and ludicrous ways. Adopting digital ethnography, thematic and textual analysis, we offer three case studies involving high-profile influencers who speak non-standard Putonghua with heavy regional accents. We argue that bullet comment users’ collectively produced and intricately orchestrated Konger writings recreate new layers of orality and serve diverse identity-making purposes within an increasingly commercialized Chinese social mediascape.
Funding source: Research Grants Council, University Grants Committee
Award Identifier / Grant number: 131194
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank Andrew Jocuns and Freek Olaf De Groot for their invitation to contribute to the special issue and the reviewers’ critical comments on an earlier draft. This article is part of a research project entitled “Temporality, Embodiment, and Creativity: A Critical Multimodal Study of New Practices on Chinese Social Media”, funded by Research Grants Council of Hong Kong (project code: 131194).
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© 2024 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Introduction to the special issue
- Research Articles
- Digital writing, recreated orality, and identity: domestication and exoticization of multilingual speech on Chinese social media
- Geographies of discourse revisited
- Multimodal creativity and identity in digital discourse: meme practices in China
- Mind maps as multimodal and multilingual literacy practices in Chinese private universities
- Dialogues of materiality: unravelling the agency of discourse and objects
- Visualizing identity: multimodal and multilingual practices in international student organizations’ on-campus artifacts
- Moin Moin is schon Gesabbel: constructing Northern German identity in commercial Instagram posts
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Introduction to the special issue
- Research Articles
- Digital writing, recreated orality, and identity: domestication and exoticization of multilingual speech on Chinese social media
- Geographies of discourse revisited
- Multimodal creativity and identity in digital discourse: meme practices in China
- Mind maps as multimodal and multilingual literacy practices in Chinese private universities
- Dialogues of materiality: unravelling the agency of discourse and objects
- Visualizing identity: multimodal and multilingual practices in international student organizations’ on-campus artifacts
- Moin Moin is schon Gesabbel: constructing Northern German identity in commercial Instagram posts
