Sociolinguistic Artifacts

CW: Suicide Logan Paul is an online personality from America that basically just makes video blogs. Recently he went to Japan and vlogged about his time there. He came under fire almost immediately for positing a video of him in the Suicide Forest where someone had just committed suicide. In the week following, people also watched other videos of his time in Japan where he basically disrespects anything and anyone. At one point he breaks a game boy on purpose and brings it back to the salesman saying it was “much-o, broken-o”. Him and his friends also get together and yell “arigato” before running around — which shows he probably had no idea what it meant but yelled it because it translates to “thank you” in English. Though the things he did were disrespectful to Japanese culture for a number of reasons these things discussed linguistically showed the shallow amount of knowledge he had on the place he was visiting and the lack of care he had for the people there. I see this as a form of speech communities - because Logan Paul is from a very laid-back, privileged, English speaking community online and went to Japan but changed nothing, therefore observably offending members of the speech communities in Japan. [Published on 01-05-2018]