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Digital ethnographic and linguistic anthropological analysis of the far right is an invaluable resource for explaining the gradual processes of socialization through which individuals are recruited into right-wing extremism. This article examines online masturbation abstention programs in three linguistic contexts (English, Japanese, and Brazilian Portuguese) as potential sites that mobilize gender and sexual norms to draw subjects into anti-feminist and racist sociopolitical visions. NoFap (known as nōfappu or onakin in Japan) is a fairly popular trend that is understood to help men regain the focus, vitality, and energy they have lost to pornography addiction. By analyzing the ways figures of personhood are constructed through the enregisterment of disparate semiotic materials in these very different contexts, we argue that the right-wing abstemious masculine subject is produced through tensions between neoliberal generalized competition and the imagined authority of a “tradition” associated with restrictive gender and sexual norms.

Many scholars consider clause-final adverbs (CFAs) like already, also, and only to be a prominent feature of Colloquial Singapore English (CSE), but little is known about their use in present-day CSE. Using data from the Corpus of Singapore English Messages (CoSEM), we investigate patterns of variation involving CFAs and examine whether they are sensitive to factors such as speaker age and gender. We find that clause-final already and only has increased over time, while clause-final also has remained stable. Overall, the results suggest that CFAs are a stable feature of CSE. Variation in the use of CFAs is conditioned by semantic function, age, and gender. Specifically, clause-final already is associated with the inceptive function. Clause-final already and also are more likely to be used by younger speakers, while clause-final also and only are more likely to be used by males and in all-male conversational settings respectively. We suggest that these patterns are due to present-day English-Mandarin bilingualism, increasingly positive attitudes toward CSE, and National Service for males. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite its innovative, salient, and robust usage in Colloquial Singapore English (CSE), the adverbial use of confirm has largely gone unnoticed. In this paper, we provide morphosyntactic and semantic evidence to show that adverbial confirm behaves like a strongly subjective speaker-oriented adverb (SpOA). We argue that adverbial confirm developed as a result of contact with the Mandarin adverbial kending, likely due to English–Mandarin bilingualism amongst Chinese Singaporeans, although its use has proliferated throughout the general CSE-speaking population. Quantitatively, adverbial confirm emerges as the most frequently used SpOA when compared to surface-semantically equivalent strongly subjective SpOAs, such as definitely, sure, for sure and surely. The results suggest an increase in preference by CSE speakers to use confirm to express strong speaker certainty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2016, Sanrio debuted a series of shorts featuring Retsuko, a cute lesser panda with a penchant for bursts of death-metal infused violent rage. The shorts, eventually transformed into a full show on Netflix, were a comedic look at Retsuko's anger at unfair treatment in the Japanese workplace, casting a critical eye on issues of sexism, harassment, and overwork. But while Retsuko has been explicitly positioned as counter cultural, what does it mean to be transgressive and Sanrio? This paper analyzes this question from a cross-disciplinary perspective, drawing on critical feminist studies, rage studies, media studies, and sociolinguistics. Approaching the framing, content, and speech of Retsuko throughout her media appearances, we argue that while Retsuko is certainly critical of contemporary Japan, her transgression is ultimately limited, with any potential paths to freedom or rebellion hampered by a corporate system that reabsorbs transgressive behavior and sells it back to customers, closing off the potential to imagine new ways of being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Colloquial Singapore English (CSE), also known as ‘Singlish’, features a wide range of sentence‐final particles (SFP) influenced by local languages such as Hokkien, Cantonese, Mandarin and Malay. This study focuses on the SFP sia, a relatively new and less‐explored particle with Malay roots. We examine sia and its variants (sia, sial, siak and siol) using data from the Corpus of Singapore English Messages, a 6.9‐million‐word text‐message corpus from 2016 to 2022.While previous research has associated sia and its variants with strong illocutionary contexts, particularly among young male Singaporeans due to its vulgar and masculine connotations, our data indicate that sia is now used more broadly among CSE‐speaking youth. It is employed in both strong and weak illocutionary contexts, suggesting a shift away from its negative/vulgar associations. Sia and its variants are emerging as general phatic markers reflecting the identity of CSE‐speaking youth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Colloquial Singapore English (CSE, commonly known as Singlish) is a linguistic variety used in Singapore, a Southeast Asian nation home to three major ethnic groups: the Chinese (74.35% of the citizen and permanent resident population), the Malays (13.43%), and the Indians (9%) (Singapore Department of Statistics, 2019). It is one of the best known post-colonial varieties of English and has been documented since the emergence of the field of world Englishes (e.g., Greenbaum, 1988; Richards & Tay, 1977). Linguistically, the grammar and lexicon of CSE are systematically imported from other non-English languages used in the island nation (Leimgruber, 2011). From a creolist perspective, it can be viewed as an English-lexifier creole that contains influences from Sinitic languages such as Hokkien, Cantonese and Mandarin, as well as Malay, Tamil and other varieties in the Singapore language ecology (McWhorter, 2007; Platt, 1975). Several distinct features across various levels of language have been investigated in CSE, including phonetics (Starr & Balasubramaniam, 2019), morphosyntax (Bao, 2010; Bao & Wee, 1999), semantics (Hiramoto & Sato, 2012), and pragmatics (Hiramoto, 2012; Leimgruber, 2016; Lim, 2007). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Almost a century after the end of the period of Japanese immigration to Hawaii plantations, the Japanese language is no longer the main medium of communication among local Japanese in Hawaii. Today, use of the Japanese language and associated traditional images are often used symbolically rather than literally to convey their meanings, and this is becoming more prevalent among locals through the medium of tattooing. Furthermore, tattooed texts and visual images now are imbued with additional local-specific indexicals that distance them from native Japanese from Japan. These tattoos are not just a fashion statement as the tattooees are committed to their own identity as represented by them. These inked identities have a value in the local community that draws on Japaneseness, but a form of Japaneseness does not necessarily share native Japanese values. Based on the data used for this study, it is clear that this method of declaring "true" Japaneseness is decried as unthinkable and unacceptable to native Japanese. These different perceptions of Japanese text and images in tattoos suggest that because of their mobility, the immigrant Japanese group went through a radical transition and created new cultural values in a new homeland.

The popular anime series, "Cowboy Bebop", was originally created and released in Japan in 1998 and later gained an intense overseas following. The show owes its phenomenal international acclaim to successful conventions of hegemonic masculinity represented by the imaginary characters. The social semiotics of desire depicted in "Cowboy Bebop" cater to a general heterosexual market in which hero and babe characters are represented by archetypes of heterosexual normativity. In this study, the idea of inter-indexicality, or "the movement between two distinctive indexical systems as a semiotic mode of subject formation" (Inoue 2003: 317), will be employed in the discussion of data derived from the Japanese and American English dubbing of "Cowboy Bebop." The analysis will focus on how ideas including heterosexual normativity are reproduced in order to negotiate the intertextual distances that link the characters and audience. Inter-indexical notions help to construct interpretive voices familiar to the cross-cultural audience's social world. (Contains 3 figures and 4 footnotes.)

This article introduces the first version of the Corpus of Singapore English Messages (CoSEM), a 3.6‐million‐word monitor corpus of online text messages collected between 2016 and 2019, compiled and managed by a group of scholars who share an interest in Colloquial Singapore English (CSE) research. The paper explains the motivations behind developing a new corpus for the investigation of CSE. It also documents the process of compiling and organizing CoSEM and describes the corpus's initial structure and composition. We further discuss the social variables used in tagging the data, as well as ethical challenges, advantages, and disadvantages unique to online message datasets. In addition, we present preliminary analyses of two selected CSE features: (1) the Hokkien‐derived expression (bo)jio and (2) sentence‐final adverbs (already, also, only). As CoSEM is an ongoing project, we conclude the article with notes on future directions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses Japan's idealization and adoration of English language while at the same time being an insular monolingual nation. English has been an imperative foreign language in Japan from the mid-1800s; today, English is regarded as one of the most important school subjects. However, most Japanese people hold anxiety about their English learning experiences. The average person lives with a dilemma of not being able to use English despite having learned it for many years. One noticeable by-product of the dilemma is rampant use of English loanwords in everyday Japanese language. Paradoxically, such loanwords tend to undergo lexical shifts in Japanese contexts beyond original meanings until native English speaers are unable to comprehend their meanings. This paper discusses the hypothetical reasons why English education stays unsuccessful, and (2) Japanese people love to rely on use of English loanwords (Japanese Anglicism) instead of speaking English. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates voluntourism activity directed by a local university in Singapore. The phenomenological experience of participating in voluntourism is captured in the form of reflective Instagram posts where voluntourists often report attaining a sense of personal growth and development, centering their experiences at the expense of their underprivileged counterparts. By conducting a text and visual analysis of their Instagram posts, we venture that the participants' travel narratives evince a collaborative effort between their transnational mobilities and the subsequent post-trip reflections to linguistically construct a global selfhood in relation to the underprivileged subject. Such self-presentations are deemed to be culturally valuable, and very much influenced by and in congruence with the Singapore government's globalization project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discourse particles are among the most commented-upon features of Colloquial Singapore English (CSE). Their use has been shown to vary depending on formality, context, gender and ethnicity, although results differ from one study to another. This study uses the Corpus of Singapore English Messages (CoSEM), a large-scale corpus of texts composed by Singaporeans and sent using electronic messaging services, to investigate gender and ethnic factors as predictors of particle use. The results suggest a strong gender effect as well as several particle-specific ethnic effects. More generally, our study underlines the special nature of the grammatical class of discourse particles in CSE, which is open to new additions as the sociolinguistic and pragmatic need for them develops. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]