Exploring Plurilingualism in Fan Fiction

Book excerpt: This book explores English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) use in online interaction within virtual communities constituted by fans of popular culture texts who engage in creative writing inspired by such texts. Emerging from globalization processes, ELF, computer-mediated-communication, and fandom are here conceptualized as postmodern phenomena, characterized by fluidity, hybridity, and translocal practices, which include the exploitation of plurilingual resources on the part of non-native users communicating in English. This study adopts and applies the notions of linguistic heteroglossia and super-diversity to the qualitative analysis of a fan fiction corpus constituted of online-published stories inspired by Japanese media texts, in which fan writers bring their sociocultural and linguistic repertoires to bear on their stories, interspersing narration and dialogue with non-English language elements to fulfil social, narrative, and pragmatic functions.