The paper addresses adolescents’ ethnometapragmatic accounts of graphemic features in their everyday texting by investigating underlying ideologies of gender. By drawing on a sample of 48 German text-messaging-chatlogs and 7 semi structured interviews with the same informants, the paper examines the emergence of enregistered styles of gender in digital communication.
The paper addresses German adolescents’ ethnometapragmatic accounts of graphemic features in their everyday digital communication by investigating underlying ideologies of gender. While gender in linguistic research on digital communication has been studied primarily from a variationist perspective (for an overview see Bieswanger 2013), the paper adopts a more interactional understanding by drawing on the concept of ‘indexing gender’ (Ochs 1992). Against this theoretical backdrop, the discussion focuses on the language ideological rationalizations and evaluations of communicative behavior in text messaging and its indexical ties to certain graphemic features. It will be shown how these metapragmatic activities enable the emergence of enregistered written styles of gender within a social population (c.f. Agha 2007). For this purpose, the paper triangulates two different data samples: (I) a sample of 48 German text-messaging-chatlogs by 23 adolescent writers (301.987 tokens) and (II) 7 semi structured group interviews with the same informants discussing their metapragmatic awareness of variation in writing and practices such as emoji usage, re-spellings and non-standard punctuation. Drawing on both samples, it can be shown how certain graphemic features undergo metapragmatic enregisterment in that the informants perceive and negotiate them as written indexicals of gender identities (in the interview sample) and function these features as a means of social positioning (in the chatlog sample). Thus, in its core the paper investigates how these indexical charges are deployed dynamically in digitally mediated interactions: For example, male writers make situational use of 'female' features to create ironic distance in same-gender communication or to indicate their romantic interest in cross-gender sequences. In view of this, the paper shows that practices of graphemic variation in everyday texting are not to be understood as essentialist gender 'reflexes' but as dynamic indexical resources for social positioning.
