What do hashtags mean?

Anyone who uses social media is probably aware of the ubiquitous hashtag. What started as a simple way to tag topics on internet chat rooms was then adopted by Twitter, and then spread to many other platforms, including Facebook, Tumblr, and Instagram. The way that the hashtag is used has changed a lot in that time, evolving from a tag into a way of deliberately communicating stances and ideas.

Barbara De Cock and Andrea Pizarro Pedraza found this to be the case when investigating the use of the #jesuis hashtag (‘I am’). You may recall that this hashtag came out of the attack on the offices of Charlie Hebdo, a French satirical magazine. People on Twitter used the hashtag #jesuischarlie to express their support and solidarity with the victims after the incident. De Cock and Pizarro Pedraza wanted to investigate the phenomenon further, to see how the #jesuis hashtag construction changed its meaning in different contexts. To do this, they manually observed and monitored the #jesuis hashtag over the course of a year, to better understand how it was being employed. They then developed a script which gathered a sample of tweets using the #jesuis construction between March and April 2016.

They found 407 different constructions, with four broad different uses: one set referring specifically to terrorist attacks; one set to other disasters involving loss of life; one set to other sad news stories; and one set which did not express solidarity in the face of tragedy, but instead were critical or mocking of the whole concept. These were most often used in conjunction with proper nouns, such as Charlie, Belge, ‘Belgium’, or Panama, but occasionally with other kinds of nouns, such as in #jesuischien, ‘I am dog’ , after the death of a police dog during a raid on a flat occupied in Belgium that was occupied by terrorists.

While the original hashtag expressed solidarity with the loss of human life, De Kock and Pizarro Pedraza noticed a broadening of its use through the four categories. For example, the #jesuisEcuador hashtag was for a natural disaster, as opposed to a terrorist attack, but was still employed to express solidarity with a loss of life. The use of the hashtag changed further still regarding other causes; a French spelling reform inspired a hashtag #jesuiscirconflexe, or ‘I am circumflex’, the diacritic used above certain French letters such as ê. While there is nothing tragic about a change of spelling, the hashtag was still being employed as a way of expressing solidarity with those who were unhappy about the proposed change. This also occurred with events which concerned free speech, something that Charlie Hebdo was seen to represent for a lot of sympathisers; the hashtag #jesuisBoehmermann was not used to express solidarity with someone that had died, but rather with a comedian who was being charged by the Turkish president for criticising him in a stand-up routine.

As with many things that are shown to align with a stance, the hashtag has been used to criticise or show disalignment as well, often by using it ironically. For example, Charlie Hebdo themselves employed the hashtag when the Panama papers news broke: when multiple politicians were found to be hiding money to avoid tax. The #jesuisPanama tag was ironic, feigning solidarity with a class of privileged people to highlight their unethical behaviour. The research showed, then, that the hashtag was being used in a variety of ways.

The authors briefly mention the English #I am tag too, pointing to the use of #I am Leicester to express proud support after the unexpected win by the Leicester football team in the 216 Premier League competition So next time you are on any social media platform, and you see the #jesuis tag or the #I am tag, you could have a think about what kind of solidarity the author is trying to show, if any.

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De Cock, B., & Pizarro Pedraza, A. (2018). From expressing solidarity to mocking on Twitter: Pragmatic functions of hashtags starting with #jesuis across languages. Language in Society 47(2):1-21.

 doi:10.1017/S0047404518000052

This summary was written by Marina Merryweather

Isn't it ironic?

Good shot!

The lyrics of Alanis Morissette’s  1996 song ‘Ironic’ (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8v9yUVgrmPY)  highlight many situations that may be described as showing irony.  However, what does the term actually mean? What is the difference between linguistic and non-linguistic irony? And can we claim that all types of irony are deliberately constructed and performed?

These are the types of questions investigated by Raymond Gibbs Jr. (2012).  He says that irony involves many different uses of language, such as sarcasm (e.g. calling someone ‘ a great friend’ after they go back on a promise) and rhetorical questions (e.g. saying ‘isn’t it lovely weather?’ during a thunderstorm).  These uses help convey different emotions from the speaker and prompt various emotional responses from the listener.

These are examples of linguistic irony (that is, irony which is conveyed through language).  However, we can also find examples of non-linguistic irony.  For example, imagine you’re watching a rugby game and the referee keeps giving penalties against your team (X) for forward passes, while the opposition (Y) seems to be getting away with them.  Now imagine the referee finally gives a penalty against the opposition and the fans of X begin to clap the referee for doing a good job.  This can be described as a non-linguistic ironic act. 

Other types of non-linguistic irony can be through the description of certain events or situations, such as a financial adviser going bankrupt or how the Austin Powers movies are an ironic commentary on the old James Bond movies. The first of these examples can be used for humorous purposes (e.g. the punch line of a joke) or may occur in real life as an accidental ironic situation.  In contrast, the Austin Powers example shows a more deliberate construction of an ironic event. 

So, how deliberate are these acts?  Gibbs notes that many scholars maintain that all ironic acts are consciously and deliberately performed.  He observes that this could be considered the case for pre-planned ironies (such as the Austin Powers movies, which are deliberate on the part of the writers), but the ‘irony’ of an event or act can only be interpreted as such if the listener/ watcher etc. understands the ironic meaning.  However, other types of irony, such as accidental irony, cannot be considered as pre-planned and so the interpretation of irony can only come about after the event has taken place.

So what about the linguistic and non-linguistic acts mentioned above?  Gibbs assesses a range of linguistic, psycholinguistic and psychological evidence relating to awareness of pragmatic meaning and concludes that general intentional desires in communication are not necessarily the same as conscious deliberate thought.  In addition to this, he notes that “our conscious thoughts may only provide after-the-fact, and often inaccurate, narratives for what we do” (p. 114).  Therefore, Gibbs suggests that whenever we speak we have a number of goals in mind (e.g. to convey a particular emotion) and that these goals will constrain the words we use and the bodily acts we display (which, when taken as a whole, can later be interpreted as ironic or not).  As a result, we need to reassess the view that all ironic acts are pre-planned and the result of deliberate and conscious thought.

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Gibbs Jr., Raymond, W. (2012) Are Ironic Acts Deliberate? Journal of Pragmatics 44: 104-115

doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2011.11.001

This summary was written by Jenny Amos

How insults can shape identity

Insults can create a feeling of belonging and shared identity

   - hey fat emo, what’s going on?

- hey old fag, where is Jossi?

This is how two young men were heard greeting each other in a youth centre in Germany. It may seem a strange way for friends to behave, but it turns out to be quite frequent behaviour amongst the young men of immigrant background that Susanne Günthner studied in Germany. Günthner and her research team recorded the informal interactions of 18 young men aged between 15 and 23 in youth centres in Münster, Rheine, Solingen and Hamm. The families of the young men had migrated from Turkey, the former Yugoslavia, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon and Morocco.

It used to be thought, Günthner points out, that the children and grandchildren of migrants would adopt the local majority language as their mother tongue. Instead, studies throughout Europe have shown that young people tend to create new forms of language (such as the Multicultural London English covered in previous posts on this blog) as well as new kinds of communicative practice. Using insults to construct friendship is one example of these communicative practices.

It seems that the insults create a feeling of belonging and shared identity among the speakers who use them, by breaking the conventional norms of how to address someone. The insults revolve around topics that relate to concepts of masculinity within the group, including manliness and sexuality, sexual subordination and homosexuality. Emo in the example above comes from the hardcore punk scene, where it refers to ‘emotionally unstable teenagers and outsiders’. Although young Germans who are not from an immigrant background also make insulting remarks to each other, the young men in Günthner’s study saw this as their own special way of speaking, claiming when interviewed that someone who wasn’t “one of us” would misunderstand the intended playfulness of the insults.

Günthner also describes how the young men in her study skilfully blend different varieties of German while speaking, to stage different social characters. This too is a way of constructing a shared identity for the group. As an example she quotes from a follow-up interview with two young men, Enis and Robbie, whose families are from the former Yugoslavia. The young speakers were explaining that it is difficult to be friends with some of the ethnically German boys at school because there are so many differences between them: for example, the German boys work too hard, don’t understand their jokes, and are brought up differently. When reporting some of the things the German boys say to them, Robbie spoke very slowly, with an exaggerated standard German pronunciation. In this way he brought to life what he considered to be a typical German – the majority group in society– but his caricature of the way that a typical German speaks presented it as pedantic and ridiculous. Although Enis and Robbie spoke throughout the interview in a way that was very close to standard German, when Robbie reports something he himself might say to a German classmate he switches into the ‘polyethnic’ or ‘multicultural’ style that is typical of the neighbourhood. Enis shows his awareness of social attitudes towards the polyethnic style in Germany by saying “you’ll never get a job like that, dude” (so kriegste nie ne arbeit, alder). Günthner claims that by animating characters in their stories with specific linguistic varieties, and by contrasting stylised and even parodied ways of speaking with their own, the young men perform “acts of identity” that create a feeling of inclusion for them within their own group versus a feeling of “otherness” for other groups in German society.

Günthner reminds us that in the modern world globalisation and widespread immigration mean that it is not only people who are moving: languages, she says, are also “on the move”, and so are communicative practices. Analysing the development and dynamics of communicative practices such as the two she focussed on helps us to understand not only the language diversity of modern societies but also the dynamics of social and cultural identities.

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Günthner, Susanne 2011. The dynamics of communicative practices in transmigrational contexts: “insulting remarks” and “stylized category animations” in everyday interactions among male youth in Germany. Text and Talk 31/4: 447-473.

doi 1860-7330/11/0031-0447

This summary was written by Jenny Cheshire