1 Alternative spelling and censorship: the treatment of profanities in virtual communities Laura-Gabrielle Goudet Université Paris 13, Sorbonne Paris Cité laura.goudet@univ-rouen.fr [Author’s version of a paper published in Aspects of Linguistic Impoliteness (2013), Cambridge Scholars Publishing] Introduction Discourse on the internet is characterized by the paradoxical ability of users to write and communicate in alternative ways, with minimal supervision or external regularization—in most, not all communities—while new norms arise and are replaced according to users of virtual communities. On most websites, there is no regulating organ, except the Terms of Service that every registered user has to abide by. The standard version (used on websites like Facebook) includes a clause stipulating that the user should not: “use the Services […] to : upload, post, transmit, share, […] any User content [deemed] harmful, threatening, unlawful, defamatory, infringing, abusive, inflammatory, harassing, vulgar, obscene, […] hateful, or racially, ethnically or otherwise objectionabl e”. A way to avoid these abuses of the service is to use automated censorship scripts, which neutralizes offensive words and expressions with a simple substitution command. The problem with such pieces of software lies in the fact that users of forums and network websites can decide to circumvent these through different strategies aiming at respelling incriminating words. As the corpus at hand is taken from a particular setting (the most important African American related website, Black Planet), other layers of identification, anti-identification and name-calling will come into play. The study of the mechanisms to counteract censorship without stopping to use profanities, as well as impolite behaviors and insults, are the main topics of this paper. It tackles the delimitation of the cat-and-mouse play between users and censorship scripts through alternative spellings (which are not to be confused with involuntary spelling mistakes), as well as the double status of certain expressions. Gender distribution of insults and name-calling will also be addressed. The parameters of censorship online are the first topic of the study. The typology of uses (and abuses) on the Internet, with a determination of the overlapping scope of alternative spellings and spelling mistakes, is the core of the second part of this study, as well as words bearing ambiguous meanings codified through sets of alternative spellings. Face-work, that is the study of social strategies used in order to give or claim value in interpersonal relations, can also be used in order to examine the difference between ritual name-calling and actual impolite, offensive discourse. The use of community-centered profanities and insults—with or without the actual will to insult—is the subject of the final part of this study. Do pseudonyms illustrate the divorce between society’s etiquette and a niche website’s new conventions, or the semantic shift of African American expressions? Community-centered insults are used, and are only understandable by members of certain subgroups (gangs, for instance). 1. CENSORSHIP ON THE INTERNET 1.1. Hypotheses around the use of alternative spellings The hypotheses relating to the use of alternative spellings are mainly the need for cohesion (Rourke et al., 2001). Users of internet forums are aggregated around common, shared values, and sharing an alternative spelling (the only form of communication on these forums is writing) allows them to share tools (the alternative tokens) to their fellow forum members. The replicated tokens, if successful, spread exponentially through the whole forum (sometimes out