Keitai shōsetsu: Mobile Phone Novels. Is It True that New Technologies Are Changing the Japanese Language?

Keitai shōsetsu, or ‘mobile phone novels’, is a recent social and ‘literary’ phenomenon that started at the beginning of this century and has subsequently become widely diffused in Japan. Novels, often written by amateur authors, are distributed via mobile phones and on the Web, and read by a huge number of people. The subjects and topics of these novels, the young age of the characters depicted, as well as of the vast majority of the addressees of these stories seem to influence the diaphasic factors of the language. For its use of mobile phone technology, keitai shōsetsu also represents a testing ground to understand the influence of tools in the transformation of language, that is hence acquiring new communication strategies. Various aspects of the Japanese language used in keitai shōsetsu are described by means of different examples and by showing the influence of widespread mobile phone habits, such as use of emoticons, on ‘literary’ production.