What do you call it?

[quinara]

There was an interesting post I read on fanlore this morning about how the latest news (that 'fan fiction' has been added to the Merriam-Webster dictionary) from otw_news should affect Fanlore, which while part of the OTW is supposed to be self-reflective of fandom, rather than looking in from elsewhere (so, the question is, is 'fan fiction' actually the standard way people write the term in fandom, or is it interchangeable with 'fanfiction' or is 'fanfiction' actually the norm - note that that's actually a separate issue to 'fanfic').

I don't agree with khellekson that "fan is not a prefix. Turning the two words into one elides the active work of the fan by making the entire word about the artwork"; I think fanfic is practically an entirely different process to 'fiction', with a different start point, goal and end point, so having an entirely different word makes sense. But that's just a difference of opinion - what I found more interesting was the general squee that 'fan fiction' was now in 'the' dictionary. I hadn't realised it wasn't!

But that would possibly be because, for me as someone in the UK, it's been in 'the' dictionary, ie. the OED, for five years. (I know that says draft, but various other places say it was added properly in December 2004; please correct me if you think I'm in error.)

Besides finding it a little peculiar that apparently US English speakers were without any point of legitimate reference at all before the addition of the term to MW, this got me wondering, in relation to Fanlore and fandom in general, what do people in non-English-speaking fandom and indeed people in English-speaking fandom for whom English isn't their first language call (what apparently is properly referred to as) 'fan fiction'. Do you compound or not? Is it always a loan word or do you have your own terms (this probably sounds ridiculously naive, but despite my FF icon I've never really been involved in fanfic/discussion for a non-English fandom)? Is there another convention elsewhere in the world?

And what do people do more generally? I'd love to hear from my flist and any random passers-by.

Comments

Re: Via metafandom

[kaz]

As another speaker of a gendered language (German), I have to say I'm really surprised at this! People seem to somehow just... know... what gender a loanword is going to be, even before any usage is set. For instance, "Fandom" is emphatically neutrum in my head; masculine seems very strange and feminine just sounds *wrong* (and German Google seems to agree with me on it, although considering the feminine article is "die" googling that one is a mite tricky). I have absolutely no idea why. And the fact that it's so seemingly-random and I can't figure out why a specific English word rings as masculine in my head and another as feminine means that I can't ascribe any particular importance to it.

Then again, not all grammatical-gender languages deal with it in the same way. *shrugs*

Re: Via metafandom

[hl]

Well, apparently there are trends! I thought that in general people tend to chose the same gender for the loan word--in Spanish, the ending of the word surely influences: 'a' sounds feminine, for example, and 'o' masculine; and probably other stuff I don't know.

But in Spanish it seems that isolated fans--i.e. Spanish speaking fans in English fandom--use the feminine like I do, and in Spanish fandom, the masculine is the norm. (Though I wonder if those of us who do simply stand out more because of the anomaly, and others isolated fans also choose the masculine but we're not noting them.)

I've gotten used to the masculine form through translation, though, and individual fans can change their own usage without too much bother, I'm guessing. It's the trend one won't be able to change.

I think usage can be political in the sense... If I were to use fandom as a feminine, even though it bothers other fans, simply because I consider it a 'female safe space' or something... that can be political. I'm not sure if the unconscious choice can be political. It could be, though, because we don't know to what extent culture influences us.