Codeswitching in a Korean online game

[Rachel Flamenbaum]

Dear Stephen,
Two of my dissertating colleagues at UCLA are doing work that bears on what
you're describing--I could reply off-list with their contact info, but I
think they deserve the publicity!

Lisa Newon has a chapter in Digital Discourse (2011) that looks at
multimodal creativity, including the management of deixis, in World of
Warcraft--though I don't believe she deals specifically with codeswitching
of the type you're describing.

Rachel George has fantastic data on Serbian teenagers' cleverly encoded
facebook status updates that play with multiple languages and multiple
scripts to a similarly bivalent homophonic effect to the one you describe.
She presented a version of this work at a panel we
co-organized<http://aaa.confex.com/aaa/2012/webprogram/Session6728.html>at
the 2012 AAAs looking at issues of orthography, codeswitching, and
identity in mediated spaces.

Best,

Rachel Flamenbaum, M.A.
Doctoral Candidate | UCLA
Department of Anthropology
*http://fieldworkfood.wordpress.com/ <http://fieldworkfood.wordpress.com/>*


On Tue, Feb 11, 2014 at 6:06 PM, Stephen C. Rea <srea at uci.edu> wrote:

> Hello all,
>
> I am hoping that some of you might be able to help point me in the
> direction of some resources that would be relevant to a piece of
> ethnographic data that I collected during my dissertation fieldwork. I work
> on South Korean online gaming culture and conducted participant observation
> in an online game called "Lineage II." While I was participating in a
> particular "raid"--i.e. a collaborative game activity oriented around
> passing through a virtual dungeon and slaying a powerful monster--one of
> the members of the raiding party typed the number "100" into the party chat
> channel. I was initially confused as to what "100" denoted in this context,
> but one of my informants explained to me that it meant "[go] back." The
> logic behind this, as I understood it, is that "100" is written as "백" in
> Sino-Korean. For those of you who don't speak Korean, 백 is pronounced like
> "baek," which sounds similar to the English word "back." Thus, in the
> context of the specific raid--which often involves party members giving
> directions to other members--"100" becomes a sort of shorthand for
> something like "뒤에 가요" ("go back"), admonishing another party member to
> reverse direction with his or her game character. Over the course of my
> fieldwork and playing this raid many more times, "100" was used in several
> instances, but it was not always used.
>
> I think that this situation resonates with issues around codeswitching and
> deixis, certainly, but there are also some other things going on (for lack
> of a better phrase) including orthography, sound symbolism, and
> interlingual homophones. Does anything come to mind immediately about a
> similar situation, or are there any articles/books--recent or not--that I
> should absolutely look to for comparison? If so, please reply to this
> message, or to srea at uci.edu. Thanks in advance for your help!
>