Cover not available
Part of
Talking about Food: The social and the global in eating communities
Edited by Sofia Rüdiger and Susanne Mühleisen
[IMPACT: Studies in Language, Culture and Society 47] 2020
► pp. 145–166

Chapter 8
Dinner for One

The use of language in eating shows on YouTube

| University of Bayreuth
In this chapter, I investigate discursive practices in eating shows, so-called Mukbang, on YouTube. Originally a South Korean phenomenon, the object of this study are the globalized, Anglophone, and asynchronous instantiations of these shows. Based on a corpus of English-language eating shows, I demonstrate how the Mukbang performers construct their discourse as a conversation over food which resembles but is also different from traditional face-to-face dinner/lunch conversations. In order to do so, the YouTubers draw on a range of linguistic strategies, such as imperatives, questions, terms of address and nicknames, pronouns, topical choices, and the characteristics of delayed interaction.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.YouTube and micro-celebrity
    • 2.1Eating shows
  • 3.Methodology
  • 4.The discursive style of eating shows on YouTube
    • Imperatives
    • Questions
    • Terms of address
    • Pronouns
    • Topical choices
    • Delayed interaction
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
Published online: 18 June 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/impact.47.08rud
References (34)
References
Andersen, J. 2015. Now you’ve got the shiveries: Affect, intimacy, and the ASMR whisper community. Television & New Media 16(8): 683–700. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Androutsopoulos, J. 2013. Participatory culture and metalinguistic discourse: Performing and negotiating German dialects on YouTube. In Discourse 2.0. Language and New Media [Georgetown University Round Table on Languages and Linguistics Series], D. Tannen & A. M. Trester (eds), 47–71. Washington DC: Georgetown University Press.Google Scholar
Androutsopoulos, J. & Tereick, J. 2016. YouTube: Language and discourse practices in participatory culture. In The Routledge Handbook of Language and Digital Communication [Routledge Handbooks in Applied Linguistics], A. Georgakopoulou & T. Spilioti (eds), 354–370. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Barratt, E. L. & Davis, N. J. 2015. Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR): A flow-like mental state. PeerJ 3: e851. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Beeman, W. O. 2014. Negotiating a passage to the meal in four cultures. In Language and Food – Verbal and Nonverbal Experiences [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 238], P. E. Szatrowski (ed.), 31–52. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Benson, P. 2015. YouTube as text: Spoken interaction analysis and digital discourse. In Discourse and Digital Practices. Doing Discourse Analysis in the Digital Age, R. H. Jones, A. Chik & C. A. Hafner (eds), 81–96. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
2016. The Discourse of YouTube: Multimodal Text in a Global Context. London: Routledge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bruno, A. L. & Chung, S. 2017. Mŏkpang: Pay me and I’ll show you how much I can eat for your pleasure. Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema 9(2): 155–171. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Burgess, J. & Green, J. 2009. YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture. Cambridge: Polity.Google Scholar
Choe, H. 2019. Eating together multimodally: Collaborative eating in mukbang, a Korean livestream of eating. Language in Society 48(2): 171–208. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Chung, H.-K., Yang, H. J., Shin, D. & Chung, K. R. 2016. Aesthetics of Korean foods: The symbol of Korean culture. Journal of Ethnic Foods 3(3): 178–188. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cwiertka, K. J. 2013. The global hansik campaign and the commodification of Korean cuisine. In The Korean Popular Culture Reader, K. H. Kim & Y. Choe (eds), 363–384. Durham NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
del Campo, M. A. & Kehle, T. J. 2016. Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR) and frisson: Mindfully induced sensory phenomena that promote happiness. International Journal of School & Educational Psychology 4(2): 99–105. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Donnar, G. 2017. ‘Food porn’ or intimate sociality: Committed celebrity and cultural performances of overeating in meokbang. Celebrity Studies 8(1): 122–127. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Frobenius, M. 2014. Audience design in monologues: How vloggers involve their viewers. Journal of Pragmatics 72: 59–72. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gerhardt, C. 2013. Food and language: Language and food. In Culinary Linguistics – The Chef’s Special [Culture and Language Use: Studies in Anthropological Linguistics 10], C. Gerhardt, M. Frobenius & S. Ley (eds), 3–49. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2014. Appropriating Live Televised Football through Talk. Leiden: Brill. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2019. ‘Showing’ as a means of engaging a reluctant participant into a joint activity. In Embodied Activities in Face-to-face and Mediated Settings: Social Encounters in Time and Space, C. Gerhardt & E. Reber (eds), 137–175. London: Palgrave MacMillan. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Goffman, E. 1981. Forms of Talk. Philadelphia PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar
Khamis, S., Ang, L. & Welling, R. 2017. Self-branding, ‘micro-celebrity’ and the rise of social media influencers. Celebrity Studies 8(2): 191–208. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Koch, P. & Oesterreicher, W. 1985/2012. Language of immediacy – Language of distance: Orality and literacy from the perspective of language theory and linguistic history. In Communicative Spaces. Variation, Contact, and Change: Papers in Honour of Ursula Schaefer, C. Lange, B. Weber & G. Wolf (eds), 441–473. Frankfurt: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
Landert, D. & Jucker, A. H. 2011. Private and public in mass media communication: From letters to the editor to online commentaries. Journal of Pragmatics 43: 1422–1434. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Landert, D. 2014. Personalisation in Mass Media Communication: British Online News between Public and Private [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 240]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lavis, A. 2017. Food porn, pro-anorexia and the viscerality of virtual affect: Exploring eating in cyberspace. Geoforum 84: 198–205. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Leppänen, S. & Elo, A. 2015. Buffalaxing the Other: Superdiversity in action on YouTube. In Language and Superdiversity, K. Arnaut, J. Blommaert, B. Rampton & M. Spotti (eds), 110–136. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Leppänen, S. & Häkkinen, A. 2012. Buffalaxed superdiversity: Representations of the Other on YouTube. Diversities 14(2): 17–33.Google Scholar
Marinescu, V. (ed.). 2014. The Global Impact of South Korean Popular Culture – Hallyu Unbound. Lanham MD: Lexington Books.Google Scholar
Marwick, A. E. 2016. You may know me from YouTube: (Micro-)celebrity in social media. In A Companion to Celebrity, P. D. Marshall & S. Redmond (eds), 333–350. Chichester: Wiley.Google Scholar
McBride, A. E. 2010. Food porn. Gastronomica 10(1): 38–46. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Page, R. 2012. The linguistics of self-branding and micro-celebrity in Twitter: The role of hashtags. Discourse & Communication 6(2): 181–201. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Pihlaja, S. 2017. More than fifty shades of grey: Copyright on social network sites. Applied Linguistics Review 8(2–3): 213–228. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Schwegler-Castañer, A. 2018. At the intersection of thinness and overconsumption: The ambivalence of munching, crunching, and slurping on camera. Feminist Media Studies 18(4): 782–785. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Senft, T.M. 2013. Microcelebrity and the branded self. In A Companion to New Media Dynamics, J. Hartley, J. Burgess & A. Bruns (eds), 346–354. Hoboken NJ: Blackwell. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wiggins, S. 2002. Talking with your mouth full: Gustatory Mmms and the embodiment of pleasure. Research on Language & Social Interaction 35(3): 311–336. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cited by (4)

Cited by four other publications

Song, Le
2024. "Oh my Dave, your face says it all!": Exploring the Multimodal Practices of Tasting in Live Streaming. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 8:MHCI ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
Davis, Heather A., Meredith R. Kells, Chloe Roske, Sam Holzman & Jennifer E. Wildes
2023. A reflexive thematic analysis of #WhatIEatInADay on TikTok. Eating Behaviors 50 ► pp. 101759 ff. DOI logo
Shen, Sijun
2023. Commercialising potential as a critical factor of differential media management: a cultural zoning study of China’s regulation of mukbang and online eating disorder communities. Media, Culture & Society 45:2 ► pp. 373 ff. DOI logo
Rüdiger, Sofia
2022. Intimate consumptions. Internet Pragmatics 5:1 ► pp. 115 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 18 october 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.