ELF Users as Creative Writers: Plurilingual Practices in Fan Fiction

Globalization processes and the increase of transnational practices in contemporary society have promoted international dialogue in a variety of fields and settings. Such interactions occur in a shared common language, most often English. The English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) perspective may be applied to all communicative contexts where English acts as the working language of international interactions in both physical and digital environments. International, interest-based groups on the Internet are a common context of use for ELF. Aficionados of pop culture texts - fans - are very active members of such virtual communities, engaging in social and creative practices with like-minded people via ELF. Creative writing inspired by these pop culture texts – fan fiction - is especially popular, and fans publish their work online, positioning themselves as successful writers within their communities. While employing ELF as the primary language of their texts, fan writers bring their sociocultural and linguistic repertoires to their stories, interspersing narration and dialogue with non-English language elements. These were analyzed in order to determine which functions they play within the texts. The notions of linguistic heteroglossia and super-diversity are adopted in relation to the qualitative analysis of plurilingual resource exploitation in a fan fiction corpus constituted of online-published stories - inspired by Japanese comics and animation, known as manga and anime - written by 26 non-native users of English. A preliminary analysis of the paratext and of reader reviews highlights the supportive and participatory attitude of the readers in relation to non-native writers, and how plurilingual resources are employed to foster social cohesion between writers and readers, who show affiliation or solidarity to specific linguacultures as well as mark themselves as members of the manga/anime community. The insertion of Japanese elements in the text is particularly frequent and significant in the story texts as well, where it acts as an authenticity device in both dialogues and narrative segments. In addition, Japanese and other languages fulfill a number of functions in the fan fiction analyzed: social, pragmatic, and narrative. Plurilingual resources appear then to be employed deliberately and to specific purposes in these creative texts. Analysis of other aspects of ELF use in fandom may help shed light on ELF in CMC contexts.