Katakana and the Mediatized Other: Script Variation in Fantastical Narratives

ABSTRACT

Katakana is commonly used to represent recent loanwords in today’s Japanese, but because of this function, it also maintains a semiotic relationship with a sense of linguistic ‘foreignness’ more generally. As a result, in fictional narratives that are grounded in everyday occurrences, katakana can also function as a means of representing disfluent uses of the Japanese language, particularly by non-native speakers. Using this relationship as a point of departure, this article analyzes data from six recent text-dependent video games to explore how the usage of katakana to represent disfluency manifests in fantastical settings. This article shows that the application of katakana-oriented stylization indexes its user as ‘Other’, positioning that character as cognitively, culturally, or behaviorally marked relative to the narrative context. Engaging directly with the semiotic phenomenon of ‘indexicality’, I demonstrate how katakana can function as a tool by which broader ideologies of linguistic difference are transposed from everyday settings to fantastical ones, shedding light on the larger role of script variation in the characterological construction of the text-based speaker.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ All translations are by the author unless stated otherwise.

² Present day aruyo kotoba is nearly exclusively associated with dated representations of native Chinese speakers, but when it first entered into use, it was used to portray any Japanese-speaking non-Japanese character. (See Kinsui 2014 for further reading.)

³ Throughout this paper, all instances of atypical katakana use (that is, not for the representation of loanwords or other lexical items commonly written in katakana) are reflected in bold in the accompanying romanization.

⁴ The term ‘morpheme boundary’ refers to the dividing point between morphemes, which are traditionally considered the smallest meaningful units within a language. For example, the verb arimasu (‘exist, will exist’) is separable into the root ari- and stem -masu.

⁵ Though technically a male god of South American origin, Quetzalcoatl in the Fate universe manifests as female and is encountered in Mesopotamia for plot-related reasons.