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Typographic mimicry is the wrapping of writing in a “foreign dress,” i.e. the use of typefaces in which one’s script (e.g. Latin) is made to visually resemble a different script (e.g. Chinese) with the goal of evoking associations with a “foreign” culture. First, this paper addresses the formal aspects of this practice, specifically the choice of visual features to be mimicked. The core part then focuses on typographic mimicry as a social practice and includes a discussion of both the typographic knowledge that different actors – both lay and expert producers and recipients – must apply to establish and recognise the associated cultural indexicality and the typographic ideologies (i.e. beliefs and attitudes) these actors hold. The central question being investigated is how typographic mimicry is discursively negotiated. An exemplary metapragmatic discourse analysis of online reactions to a food ad and comments to two articles covering the topic catered at readers with different knowledge backgrounds highlights that typographic mimicry is not a “neutral” practice. It shows that central aspects being debated are the (re)appropriation of cultural stereotypes by users both outside and within the respective cultures and the related question of whether using typographic mimicry is generally (in)appropriate (or even racist).

Grapholinguistics, the multifaceted study of writing systems, is growing increasingly popular, yet to date no coherent account covering and connecting its major branches exists. This book now gives an overview of the core theoretical and empirical questions of this field. A treatment of the structure of writing systems—their relation to speech and language, their material features, linguistic functions, and norms, as well as the different types in which they come—is complemented by perspectives centring on the use of writing, incorporating psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic issues such as reading processes or orthographic variation as social action. Examples stem from a variety of diverse systems such as Chinese, English, Japanese, Arabic, Thai, German, and Korean, which allows defining concepts in a broadly applicable way and thereby constructing a comparative grapholinguistic framework that provides readers with important tools for studying any writing system. The book emphasizes that grapholinguistics is a discipline in its own right, inviting discussion and further research in this up-and-coming field as well as an overdue integration of writing into general linguistic discussion.

Writing is an eclectic phenomenon whose many facets are studied by the young interdisciplinary field of grapholinguistics. Linguistically, writing is a system of graphic marks that relate to language. Under the lens of processing, it is a method of producing and perceiving utterances with our hands, eyes, and brains. And from a communication theoretical and sociolinguistic perspective, it is an utterly personal medium that allows users not only to convey messages to others but also to associate themselves with cultures or ideologies. These perspectives must merge to become the foundation of a functional theory of grapholinguistics that aims not only to describe how writing systems are built but to explain why they are built that way. Starting with a unified framework that allows the description of all types of writing systems with comparative concepts (such as grapheme) and moving towards the incorporation of evidence from disciplines such as psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics to arrive at explanations, this book establishes the cornerstones of such a functional theory of writing. The Nature of Writing is a collection of ideas about writing, a status report about relevant research, a discovery of desiderata, and a new perspective. It is a start, but most importantly, it is an invitation.

In this essay, I discuss the challenges of (engaging in) grapholinguistics, a young field that focuses on writing, a topic mostly marginalized within ‘mainstream’ linguistics to this day. Issues that are raised include the lack of writing-related classes in linguistic study programs, institutionalization (e.g., departments or chairs for grapholinguistics), and pertinent publication and presentation outlets. Furthermore, the essay highlights problems caused by the interdisciplinarity of grapholinguistics, including linguistic, theoretical, methodological, and terminological boundaries that must be crossed. These issues are partially addressed through a personal lens, i.e. my own ‘journey’ in the field thus far. This allows me to speak from (some) experience not only about the risks of focusing on a topic at the periphery of many disciplines and some of the setbacks this entails but also about my motivation behind proposing a (sketch of a) theory of writing in my PhD thesis that—based on linguistic Naturalness Theory—aims to offer a unified descriptive and explanatory framework for studying writing systems and writing in general. It also gives me a chance to argue that writing, which can be studied with many of the concepts firmly established in other fields of linguistics (as well as additional writing-specific concepts), is central to every language that is spoken, signed and written in literate language communities and should therefore be an integral rather than an optional part of linguistic theories and paradigms in general. Essentially, this essay highlights why doing research in grapholinguistics should be embraced rather than justified.

The present article stands at the interface of CMC research andgrapholinguistics. After outlining which features are typical of the writing of pri­vate text messages, the focus of the first part of the paper (Sections 2 and 3) lieson the use of emojis. Notably, emoji use is not—as is commonly done—analyzedunder a pragmatic perspective, but grapholinguistically, at the graphetic andgraphematic levels: emojis are conceptualized as visual shapes that may assumegraphematic functions within a given writing system. In the second part (Sec­tion 4), it is underlined that all variants of written digital communication (suchas the use of emojis, but also all other characters) are made possible only due tothe Unicode Consortium’s decisions; this, finally, is argued to have far­reaching consequences for the future of writing.

Dieses Buch stellt die erste umfassende wissenschaftliche Auseinandersetzung mit der Graphetik dar jenem interdisziplinären Forschungsfeld, das die Form und Materialität von Schrift untersucht. Neben einer kritischen wissenschaftsgeschichtlichen Darstellung der wichtigsten Beiträge zentraler Vertreterinnen und Vertreter werden relevante Definitionen gesammelt und diskutiert. Ein vorgeschlagenes Modell rückt graphetische Beschreibungsebenen und Einheiten in den Fokus, bevor schließlich der perzeptive Aspekt von Schrift beleuchtet wird und Konzepte wie Leserlichkeit und Lesbarkeit besprochen werden. Ein programmatisches Fazit samt Desideratakatalog wagt zuletzt einen Blick in die Zukunft der Graphetik., (VLID)4520668