Paper short abstract:

In this study, I examine emoticons, emojis, and stickers in German and Japanese digital conversations. I observed a Japanese LINE group chat and a German WhatsApp group talk over 22 months using ethnographic research methods. The findings indicate that there are various culture-specific features.

Paper long abstract:

In this empirical study, I examine visualizations in German and Japanese digital group conversations. For the comparison, I observed an authentic chat of a Japanese LINE group talk and a German WhatsApp group talk over 22 months using ethnographic research methods. In the analysis, three types of graphicons (Herring and Dainas 2017), namely classic emoticons (Western smilies and Japanese kaomoji), emojis and Japanese stickers (Kato 2017) played an important role.

Central questions in the study address the following issues: What type of graphicons are used (which emoticons, emojis, stickers) and with what frequency? Are there individual preferences among the participants in the conversation or is it possible to identify a common group style? At which parts in the conversation are graphicons often used? Are all graphicons only found at the end of sentences or are there also examples at the beginning or in the middle of a sentence? What functions do the respective graphicons fulfil?

In order to answer these questions, I carried out a linguistic discourse analysis. The findings indicate that there are culture-specific peculiarities on the style level. My research reveals differences both in the choice of graphicons and in the way they are used with regard to functions, such as economization or modulization of the chat conversations (Skovholt et al. 2014).

Herring, S., and A. Dainas (2017). “Nice Picture Comment!” Graphicons in Facebook Comment Threads. In Proceedings of the Fiftieth Hawai’i International Conference on System Sciences. Los Alamitos, CA: IEEE Press. https://doi.org/10.24251/HICSS.2017.264.

Kato, Y. (2017). LINE no sutanpu ga shiyō sareru jōkyō ni kansuru kiso chōsa [Basic Survey on the Use of LINE Stamps]. Journal of information and media studies, 3, 21–34.

Skovholt, K.; Grønning, A.; Kankaaranta, A. (2014): The Communicative Functions of Emoticons in Workplace E-Mails: :-). In: Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 19. 780-797.