1

Table of Contents
Introduction......................................................................................................................................... 2
Theoretical Background ...................................................................................................................... 4
Method ................................................................................................................................................ 5
Results ................................................................................................................................................. 7
British English vs. American English ................................................................................................ 7
Complexity ....................................................................................................................................... 9
Vulgarity and Things Not Left Unsaid ............................................................................................ 11
Speaking and Shrieking.................................................................................................................. 14
Discussion .......................................................................................................................................... 17
Conclusion ......................................................................................................................................... 18
References ............................................................................................................................................. 20
Appendix............................................................................................................................................ 22
 2

Introduction

While fanfiction has already existed long before the advent of the internet – published in fan
magazines and shared in small circles. It was in the early- to mid-1990s (Kustritz, 2003, p. 372)
that fanfiction developed from a niche phenomenon to an easily accessible space to share and
consume content in the dawn of the digital age (Herzing, 2005, p. 3). It is one of many forms
of transformative writing, set apart from others (such as recreations or sequels or modern
adaptions) its unofficial nature. Its contribution is mainly non-commercial and the difficult
question of the legal status under which these works are published remains up for dispute. In
her basic introduction to the subject, Anne Jamison, Professor of English at the University of
Utah, defines fanfiction as “writing that continues, interrupts or just riffs on stories and
characters other people have already written about.” (Jamison, 2015, p. 4)
Despite fanfiction existing for many decades prior to the creation of Harry Potter, it is
particularly this franchise that enticed many people to create fanfiction (Tosenberger,
Homosexuality at the Online Hogwarts: Harry Potter Slash Fanfiction, 2008, pp. 185-186) and
with the continued popularity of Harry Potter until today and with many fanfiction writers still
writing about it even long after original series has ended, it offers a particular insight into the
fanfiction community and the particular language employed for this form of writing.
Fanfiction is an example of a virtual space in which people from various diverse cultural
backgrounds with different native languages are brought together by a common interest (Grazzi
Linking ELF and ELT in Secondary School through Web-Mediation: The Case of Fanfiction,
2015) and – as this work will show – mainly generate content in English.
Particularly with increasing interest in using fanfiction writing in English lessons for
non-native speakers (Grazzi, 2015) and generally furthering media literacy (Tosenberger, 2008,
p. 186) questions about exactly what kind of language is employed in fanfiction has become a
relevant subject for people even outside of this particular community.
One source of influence on the language used in fan-writing is the original work it is
based on. But especially fanfiction published online co-exists with other fanfiction in a way
other fiction is not. Writing fanfiction about more than one original work, reviews and direct
author-reader interaction and the tagging- and rating-conventions of the various databases bring
the community of fanfiction writers closely together. Using Harry Potter as an example, this
paper presents findings about the language used in fanfiction obtained from different corpora
to determine how strongly this close exchange affects the way fanfiction authors write.
The objective is to show how strongly they are trying to imitate the stylistic choices and tone
of the original author or whether maybe fanfiction has developed a style of its own with its own
 3

linguistic markers, transcending the limitations of a single “fandom” such as Harry Potter and
J.K. Rowling’s style.
The foundation of this work are three different Corpora specifically assembled for this work:
The first Corpus consists of various Harry Potter novels in their original British English
version: Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets,
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban and Harry Potter and the Halfblood-Prince. The
reason not all novels are contained in this corpus is that this combination aligned the number of
words in this corpus very closely with the number of words in the other corpora – all three of
which contain circa 640.000 words which makes the returns for the queries easy to compare
with no need to round up or off which might distort results.
The second corpus consists of Harry Potter Fanfiction. I found most of my material on
the website archiveofourown.org, a popular website where users post, read and share fanfiction
as well as original fiction. The reason I used this website are various, the following two being
the most compelling for my work:
For one, the search engine works very similar to the ones linguistic corpora use, employing a
tagging system, word searches and the means to include and exclude various characteristics.
Furthermore, many users have exported theirs or other people’s work from sites such as
fanfiction.net or LiveJournal to archiveofourown.org, resulting in a spectrum of fanfiction
dating back from the early 2000s to today. There will be further explanation how this corpus
was assembled in the method section of the paper.
The third corpus consists of generic fanfiction, excluding specifically Harry Potter
Fanfiction and Fanfiction of other British works such as Sherlock Holmes, Misfits, In The
Flesh, Doctor Who and other popular tv shows, books and movies from countries speaking
predominantly British English. The point of this exclusion was to highlight the parallels and the
differences in the languages used in these works. As this corpus is intended to be a more
comprehensive representation of the writing styles generally employed by fanfiction writers, as
few restrictions as possible were placed on these queries rather than the numerous used for the
corpus of Harry Potter fanfiction. The relevant restrictions were to limit the word count to
between 9900 and 10000 words and to only use works in English.
Based on these corpora, this work will employ different means to analyse the language used,
the implications about the content - as well as the writers and readers of fanfiction.
The first focus will be on the use of British English in comparison to American English
in an attempt to determine whether fanfiction writers prefer to adopt the English variety of J.K.
 4

Rowling’s English or to use American English due to its strong influence on the internet (Sophia
Ananiadou, 2012, p. 11).
In a second section, the language used in the three corpora will be analysed to determine
various factors that might help quantify aspects such as difficulty level, sentence length and
vocabulary level to be able to compare whether Harry Potter Fanfiction tends to resemble more
the writing of J.K. Rowling or whether it resembles more the language used in other fanfiction.
There will be a short analysis of the use of “adult” language and themes deemed perhaps
unsuitable for novels such as the Harry Potter franchise and how writers of Harry Potter
fanfiction implement such elements into their writing.
Finally, this work will look at the use of speech and how it is marked textually by
looking at the use of some common markers of direct speech in texts and their frequency as
well as specific implications this has for the writing.

Theoretical Background

One of the great obstacles when researching fanfiction is that most research is from the
early 2000er years and while they highlight the importance of the internet for the writing
conventions in the fanfiction community, they do not reflect many of the developments of the
last several years. Especially for a work such as Harry Potter, which was first published in the
late 1990s as a novel intended for children and young adults, this means that the ages and
educational backgrounds of writers of respective fanfiction have changed considerably since
Bolt’s survey from 2004 – a brief research which surveyed specifically Harry Potter fanfiction
writers. To remedy that, I conducted a small survey myself among Tumblr-users who write
fanfiction which – while being too small to be widely representative – at least indicates a strong
representation of women over 30 with B.A. or M.A. titles among Harry Potter fanfiction writers
which were represented to a far smaller degree in Bolt’s survey from 2004.
Furthermore, most research on fanfiction usually focusses less on linguistic aspects of
fanfiction but on literary aspects as well as attempts to understand the culture around fanfiction,
its social implications or its promise as an educational tool.
While drawing on fundamental research and findings of scholars on the subject such as
Black and Tosenberger, this paper will therefore be based especially on the research conducted
and the corpora assembled for this research.
One research project conducted by Enrico Grazzi of the Roma Tre University in 2011
and 2012 concluded that fanfiction offers an opportunity for native speakers of English and
 5

learners of English to work together on projects (Grazzi, 2015, p. 66) which could be used for
educational purposes – A hope supported by other researchers on the subject of fanfiction such
as Rebecca W. Black of the University of California-Irvine (Black, 2006) and experts on foreign
language teaching such as Soomin Jwa of the University of Arizona (Jwa, 2012). As this is a
relevant appliance of fanfiction outside its natural community, this theory is one I wish to
particularly discuss later based on my own findings during this research.

Method

Assembling the Harry Potter corpus from works of archiveofourown.org, the primary
strategy was to exclude works which might distort the results of a corpus query.
There are 187.426 works on archiveofourown.org under the tag “Harry Potter – J.K. Rowling.”1
I used this tag, as it specifies that these works are not based on the movies, but on the written
work. The reason for this specification were less the difference between the books and the
movies (regarding plot, language use or characterisations) but rather the assumption that authors
who use this tag are familiar enough with J.K. Rowlings written work and the language she
uses to be able to adopt or imitate it.
First the tags “First Person POV” and “Second Person POV” were excluded, as a first-
or second-person narrator would be fundamentally different from the writing style Rowling
used in the Harry Potter novels. Nevertheless, the existence of this stylistic choice among
fanfiction writers is interesting for this work and it should be noted that with a prevalence of
1336 such works among the 187426 in this tag, it is not a common one. While assembling my
corpus, a small count of fanfiction using first- or second-person narrators which were not tagged
accordingly, were excluded manually for the same reason which means that the exact amount
of writers which decide against imitating the third person narration as found in the Harry Potter
novels is hard to determine based on the tagging-system alone.
The next tag excluded were “Original Characters”, “Original Female Character(s)” and
“Original Male Character(s)”, as any specific choice regarding language patterns or settings
(such as for example the insertion of a character speaking a non-British variety of English)
could distort corpus queries for such aspects. This exclusion left a count of 171.952 works in
the tag which suggests that the adding of original characters can be considered a quite popular
choice. An exclusion based on similar thinking was the exclusion of the tag “Alternative

1
Annotation: It should be noted that this count and the corpus this work is based on includes works marked as
“Restricted” which can only be accessed by users logged into an account on archiveofourown.org.
 6

Universe” – which describes fanfiction that sees the characters from the original work in a
different setting. As a different setting (such as a historical one, one set in the United States or
the future) might have drastic effects on language use, it was excluded. For the same reasoning
the tags “Crack” was excluded, as fanfiction with this genre of parodic elements often change
the setting in a way similar to “Alternative Universes”. The next exclusion was removing works
tagged as “Crossover” as they might employ the writing styles of other authors or have similar
elements such as “Alternative Universes.” With these exclusions, 133.392 works were left in
this tag.
Originally, the number of words per fanfiction were set to 2.000-10.000 to guarantee a wide
spectrum of authors to be represented, but eventually the fanfiction that were added to the
corpus all had a word count of between 9.900-10.000 words as large parts of fanfiction consist
of author’s notes, song lyrics and links and other such elements that had to be removed manually
from the corpus which would have resulted in a considerable additional workload for shorter
works. This choice brought the count of works meeting all the criteria down to 41.565 works
of the original 187.426. Adding a limitation to English-speaking works removed another 3.294
works, testifying to English being the lingua franca of Harry Potter fanfiction at least on
archiveofourown.org.
The tagging-system employed by the website archiveofourown.org allows authors to
attribute their writing to more than one original work, even when not specifically marking them
as crossovers. To ensure that the corpus would not contain such works, additional tags were
excluded to avoid foreign works and various different reincarnations of the Harry Potter
franchise such as: Lego Harry Potter, Lego Lord of the Rings, Lego Star Wars, Lego The
Hobbit, Lego Star Wars: The Yoda Chronicles, Lego Star Wars: The Freemaker Adventures.
These exclusions left the count of suitable works at 38.269. Furthermore, the corpus excludes
fanfiction to the prequels “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them” and “Harry Potter and
the Cursed Child.” For one, no actual original novel exists for these works, only screenplays,
and additionally “Fantastic Beasts” is set in the United States in the 1920s, which would affect
the language used immensely. These exclusions left the count at 36.243. One might assume that
these works are less popular than the original works among fanfiction writers, but it must be
kept in mind that the archiveofourown database contains fanfiction dating back to 20032. J.K.
Rowling’s newer works are far younger than the original works of the franchise which means
that fanfiction writers simply had more time to produce fanfiction based on the original series.

2
Annotation: The oldest work to be found was “A Strong Defense” by Ellen Fremedon and was first posted on
31. July 2003. Notably, the title contains a non-British spelling of the word “Defence”
 7

Of the 36.243 works left in the corpus, 65 works from different years, authors, genres
and with different ratings were chosen for the corpus. The contents of these were stripped of
author’s notes that were not part of the story texts, song lyrics, quotes and poetry that were not
of the author’s own writing or part of the plot as well as fanart and other foreign elements that
were not strictly part of the prose.

Results

British English vs. American English

Harry Potter is not only written in British English by a British English author, it also
represents British culture in various deeper, more cultural ways. An example for this is the
setting inside a boarding school and – historically and literary – this motif has a long history in
British writing and is by some assumed to be exclusive to British literature (Steege, 2002).
While the nuances of an entire genre are difficult to grasp and quantify in linguistic patterns,
the deep connection of the Harry Potter franchise with many aspects of British culture are
basically inseparable and in an analysis such as this, it can therefore be expected that evidence
of that connection will be found in the respective fanfiction and the language it uses, even by
non-British writers.
Some conclusions could already be drawn while assembling the corpus. While the
corpus of generic Fanfiction is based on works from various languages3 and the Harry Potter
fanfiction corpus is based on a single original work written in British English, English is
evidently the lingua franca among fanfiction writers.
This has little to do with the language used by the original author or the setting of a
canon work. A generic search of fanfiction collected under the tag: Harry Potter – J.K. Rowling
returns 187.700 results, 172.238 results when restricted to works marked as written in English
which means that 91% of all these works are written in English.
Doing the same query without restricting the original works – which means searching the entire
archiveofourown-database – brings back 4.182.756 works in total and 3.941.837 works marked
as written in English – which constitutes 94% of the entire database. (While 6% of fanfiction
being written in English might seem little, it is a higher number than found in the survey

3
Annotation: Japanese works featuring very prominently as a language of original works that English-language
Fanfiction were based on
 8

conducted for this research (Appendix, Chart 2) in which only one fanfiction writer reported
that they wrote in a language other than English (German).)
While writing in one specific language is rarely a style choice, one can still conclude that the
native language of an original work does not invoke a greater tendency among fanfiction writers
to write in that language as the database containing fanfiction based on works not exclusively
written in English contains more English fanfiction than the Harry Potter-tag.
This finding must be regarded under the consideration that J.K. Rowling’s works were
translated into far more languages than most works and was therefore accessible to a wide
spectrum of readers regardless of their ability to speak English or to write prose in it.
A different, more specific distinction is the usage of British and American variations of
English by writers of Harry Potter fanfiction compared to other fanfiction.
Many British words are very central to the Harry Potter franchise – such as “Platform”
9 ¾ - and it stands to assume that they will be used in fanfiction – especially since such
important words even carried over into the American “translation” of the original novels.
While fanfiction writers might maintain these and other distinctions to write ‘authentically’ it
also seems reasonable to assume that not all writers would aim to do this or are familiar enough
with the differences between American and British English to implement these language
differences successfully.
An AntConc search for common words with different spellings supports this theory:
While J.K. Rowling maintains a consistently British English vocabulary in her novels and
searches for common American English words such as “center”, “color” and “favorite” return
no results, they do occur in Harry Potter fanfiction. On the other hand, British spellings occur
at a higher rate in Harry Potter fanfiction than they do in the corpus of other fanfiction.
In return, American spelling conventions are usually used with a lesser frequency in Harry
Potter fanfiction than in the general corpus, although in some places (“center”,
“licence/”license”) outliers occur.

Harry Potter Harry Potter Fanfiction General Fanfiction

colour 38 36 11
color 0 20 26
centre 37 12 10
center 0 30 30
offence 5 1 3
offense 0 4 6
in # street 6 1 1
 9

on # street 0 2 11
pyjamas 25 11 1
pajamas 0 3 6
liquorice 4 2 0
licorice 0 1 2
favourite 56 25 6
favorite 0 30 38
licence 3 0 1
license 0 2 6

It is safe to say that non-British writers of fanfiction based on original works written in British
English – at least in the case of Harry Potter – try to adjust their spelling to a more British style.
While it could be argued that a British franchise such as Harry Potter might simply have more
British fans writing fanfiction based on it, it seems valuable to consider the implications of the
below average ratio of English to non-English fanfiction in the Harry Potter franchise:
Considering the vast majority of fanfiction being English, the fact that almost 9% - instead of
about 5% - of all Harry Potter fanfiction on archiveofourown.org is not even written in English
in the first place, one has to conclude that Harry Potter fans are linguistically very diverse.
Past research has already revealed that fanfiction writers do communicate inside their
community to exchange cultural knowledge of customs, daily life, marriage, folklore and other
aspects of life outside their own cultural circle to strive for authenticity in their writing when
creating – or re-creating - the setting they are writing about (Black R. W., 2007). The corpus
analysis supports the thesis that these efforts are made among Harry Potter fanfiction writers as
well.

Complexity

While the use of UK English varieties is a strong indicator of efforts to imitate the style of the
original novels, this does not prove an attempt to imitate Rowling’s language use. The findings
of the previous section pose the question whether the fanfiction writers aren’t merely adjusting
their style to the language variety best matching the setting of the story they are writing as much
as they are specifically imitating the style of the original author.
To make the writing style of the three corpora accessible for comparison, all three of them were
analysed using the ATOS readability formula by Renaissance Learning. ATOS is based on a
strictly quantitative approach to rating the readability and complexity of any writing based on
sentence length, difficulty level of the words used and word length. ATOS does not take into
 10

account the content or any individual characteristics of the reader or the writer such as the
motivation behind reading a text or the background knowledge required. ATOS is an accepted
measure for complexity by the US-American Common Core Standards and rates texts on a
grade level scale (Council of Chief State School Officers, 2018, p. 2).
There is little reliable data on the exact demography of fanfiction writers. A survey
conducted in 2004 revealed that about 48% of Harry Potter fanfiction writers have a High
School level education (Bolt, 2004, Appendix, Chart 4) while the survey conducted for this
research saw most people writing for Harry Potter fanfiction with a university level eductation
or beginning unviersity. (Appendix, Chart 2) Due to the time that has passed since then, the
grown acceptance and popularity of fanfiction (Thomas, 2011, p. 2), the growth of Harry Potter
into an international phenomenon and the natural progression of time, it is not surprising that
my surveys found the vast majority of Harry Potter fanfiction authors with some form of higher
education and well into their thirties. At the same time, Harry Potter does not seem to have lost
its popularity among younger readers – and writers – as it is among the only fandoms in the
2018 survey which had High School students writing for it today – people who weren’t even
born when Harry Potter was first published (Rowling, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone,
1997). The greatest consistency seems to be in the finding that most fanfiction writers identify
as female and that the LGBT+ community is well presented among the authors. (Appendix,
Chart 2).
One may conclude that the writers of Harry Potter fanfiction are in fact older than the intended
target audience of the original novels and have an educational background that likely
familiarised them with complex reading.
Based on that, one could assume that the language complexity used in Harry Potter fanfiction
(published mostly after Bolt’s survey in 2004) would even be higher than that used in the novels.
The ATOS simulation reveals that this however is not the case:

Harry Harry Generic Silence of the

Potter Potter fanfiction Lambs
fanfiction

ATOS Level: 6,6 6 6,1 5,6

Average Word Length: 4,4 4,3 4,3 4,3
Average Sentence 14,1 12,5 12,5 11,1
Length:
Average Vocabulary 5,1 5,4 5,4 4,7
Level:
 11

While the complexity of all three texts is placed at a Level 6 by Atos (recommending reading
of this complexity for 6th graders), Harry Potter is rated with an ATOS Level of 6,6 while the
corpus of general fanfiction is placed at a Level of 6,1 and the Harry Potter Corpus at a 6,0. In
fact, overall the two fanfiction corpora resemble each other very closely and are identical in
average word length, sentence length (both shorter than in the Harry Potter novels) and the level
of vocabulary used (which is higher than the one in the Harry Potter corpus).
To put the disparity between the data gained from analysing the three corpora into clearer
perspective: The ATOS Level of the fanfiction corpora is more similar to that of for example
The Silence of the Lambs (a random pick) than to that of Harry Potter (Appendix, Chart 3) and
one can therefore not assume a particular effort to recreate J.K. Rowlings stylistic choices when
it comes to complexity, sentence structure or vocabulary choices.
This suggests that when it comes to complexity – and especially the choice of vocabulary –
Harry Potter fanfiction has more in common with other fanfiction than with the original works.
Whether writing at this complexity level is indicative of specific writing style among fanfiction
writers could be explored in further research, but based on this it stands to assume that rather
than imitating Rowling’s style, writers merely favour the British variety to accommodate the
setting of their story in an authentic way.

Vulgarity and Things Not Left Unsaid

The first section of this work proved that fanfiction writers adopt British English orthography
into their Harry Potter fanfiction to a certain degree while the second section proved that other
aspects of these works – such as choice of words – do not seem intended to recreate the tone of
original author.
Just like the writing resembles and differs in different linguistic aspects, the content does the
same.
Fanfiction interacts with certain aspects of the “canon” material – the characters, the plot,
sometimes even just the setting – while at the same time ignoring others. Sometimes fanfiction
places characters in different settings or maintains settings and characters and changes the plot
– or casts aside characters as well as settings to place other characters in that setting resulting
in a “crossover” (Jwa, 2012, p. 328).
Part of the appeal of fanfiction is certainly addressing a subject in a way the original work does
not. One aspect of that are the strong sexual themes which are for example reflected in the erotic
 12

novel Fifty Shades of Grey which took its beginnings as a fanfiction (Tosenberger, Mature
Poets Steal: Children's Literature and Fanfiction, 2014, p. 4).
While the existence of such themes in youth-oriented fanfiction – and specifically Harry Potter
– is already a deviation from the tone and style choices of the author, it also goes to highlight a
deviation from the linguistic choices of J.K. Rowling.
To return to the example of the preferred usage of British English in Harry Potter fanfiction –
authors of fanfiction with explicitly sexual and violent themes can be expected to use language
that cannot be found in the original novels in form of expletives typical for English in its British
varieties.
Support for this thesis can be found by searching the corpora for expletives and words in British
English which Rowling did not use in her novels, likely for reasons of perceived propriety:

Harry Potter HP Corpus FF Corpus

Common “vulgar” words in British English which do not appear in the Harry Potter series:

arse 0 126 6

shag/shagged 0 35 0

bloody hell 0 32 0

bugger 0 20 0

bollocks 0 10 0

arsehole 0 6 0

Common “vulgar” words which are not specific for British English but do not appear in the Harry
Potter series:
fuck* 0 498 513

ass 0 14 113

asshole 0 2 29

Examples for expletives in British English that do appear in the Harry Potter
series:
Blimey 31 6 0

git 15 35 0

From these results one can conclude that British English words that are maybe considered too
vulgar for a young readership and do therefore not appear in the Harry Potter novels, are still
avidly used in the fanfiction.
 13

Furthermore, expletives that are not strictly British English such as “fuck”, “ass” or “asshole”
are used less often than their British English counterparts. While Harry Potter fanfiction writers
are not notably less likely to use “adult language” than writers of fanfiction for other, maybe
adult-oriented, work, they still do prefer to use “adult language” that seems natural and
authentic to the setting of the original work. The conclusion one can draw here is that fanfiction
does not merely seek to change the original work but to enhance it. Instead of “merely”
recreating the tone J.K. Rowling used, fanfiction writers here do seem to push back against
restrictions placed on the works due to its nature as a YA novel.
It is not authentic that no one would swear in a world that revolves around teenage lives at a
school and contains characters from many other walks of life. Rowling does not avoid the use
of “swear words” to write authentically or naturally. She does it to accommodate a specific
audience.
And while language in written fiction is never an authentic representation of spoken language,
the restrictions placed on fiction intended for young adults are not restrictions the actual
audience wants – they reflect the desire to regulate which language and contents young people
come into contact with, consume and potentially imitate (Tosenberger, 2014, p. 10). And while
this might happen with the best intentions in mind and even be a choice of the author, there is
no authority in the fanfiction community to enforce such restrictions on text level, especially
with a significant part of the writing community being well into their twenties or older with no
need of the protective measures applied to the intended audience of YA-literature. (Appendix,
Chart 2) Therefore, these decisions can be considered an effort to naturalise the spoken
language and the themes of the series, proving once again that the fanfiction writers care more
about authenticity than re-creation the original work and its tone.
 14

Fanfiction Writers By Age

according to survey conducted for this paper

<20 years old

>30 22%
27%

20-30
51%

Speaking and Shrieking

All fanfiction chosen for this corpus contains direct speech. While there are many indications
of speech, it is difficult to recognise them in the fanfiction corpora, as users do not indicate or
format direct speech in their writing consistently. Therefore, I used common words to indicate
a character spoke such as “Said”, “Asked”, “Whispered”, “Shouted” and “Yelled”. For a query
to return more examples of actual speech, these searches had these words preceded by “he” or
“she” (As I cannot search for every name in the corpus of generic fanfiction, I forwent searching
for individual names). While it is possible to use AntConc to search for both “he” and “she” at
the same time, using separate queries also gives insight into how often characters of a specific
gender speak.
The use of certain words to indicate speech is a matter very individual to each author and genre
– for example J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series often simply uses “he said” or “she said” in
 15

many instances. The corpora search confirms this: There are 1104 instances of “*he said” in
the Harry Potter corpus – which is about as much as in both fanfiction corpora combined.
Again, it seems that fanfiction writers have more in common with each other than with the
original writer of the work. While AntConc finds more returns for words favoured in the Harry
Potter corpus in the Harry Potter Fanfiction Corpus than in the corpus of other fanfiction, the
numbers of returns in the two fanfiction corpora are usually more similar than the returns from
the Harry Potter Fanfiction Corpus and the Harry Potter novel texts:
gendered Harry Potter HP Corpus FF Corpus

he said 792 458 310

she said 312 245 208
he asked 81 151 115
she asked 14 97 59
he whispered 33 60 32
she whispered 20 28 24
he shouted 33 13 3
she shouted 6 3 3
he yelled 21 6 7
she yelled 0 2 3
he answered 3 13 7
she answered 3 8 4
he whined 1 4 4
she whined 0 3 0
he shrieked 3 1 0
she shrieked 7 2 2

For example: “He shouted” appears 33 times in the corpus of Harry Potter fanfiction. There are
13 returns in the Harry Potter fanfiction corpus and 3 in the generic fanfiction corpus. “She
shouted” appears 6 times in the Harry Potter corpus and 3 times each in the others. “He yelled”
has 21 returns in the Harry Potter corpus, 6 in the corpus of Harry Potter fanfiction and 7 in the
generic fanfiction corpus- “she yelled” does not appear at all in the Harry Potter corpus, two
times in the Harry Potter fanfiction corpus and 3 times in the generic fanfiction corpus.
The analysis shows that fanfiction writers tend to use similar words with a similar frequency
and while words favoured by J.K. Rowling might be used more often in Harry Potter fanfiction,
it is not a consistent rule and usually the returns from the two fanfiction corpora are much closer
to each other than the returns from the Harry Potter corpus.
 16

A general rule for all three corpora seems to be that female characters speak significantly less
than male characters.
An exception here are the variations of the word “shrieking”, which is more often used
to describe female utterances than male utterances.
While the small number of “he shrieked”s is hardly representative, are more detailed query for
every use of any variation of the word “to shriek” reveals the context in which male “shrieks”
happen:
Every single instance of an individual male character “shrieking” sees a character with general
or situational negative connotation do it:
Shrieks are uttered by antagonist characters such a Quirrell (when already revealed to conspire
with Voldemort), the cruel Hogwarts caretaker Filch (three times), Voldemort (three times),
Severus Snape when positioning himself as an antagonist to Sirius Black at the end of the third
book, the traitor of Harry’s parents Peter Pettigrew, the Death Eater Barty Crouch jr., the Death
Eater Avery, the incompetent Minister of Magic Cornelius Fudge and the antagonistic
poltergeist Peeves. To research this discovery further, I did an additional query on the Harry
Potter novels that did not originally enter into the corpus. In Harry Potter and the Deathly
Hallows “male shrieks” come from: Harry’s abusive uncle Vernon, the petty criminal
Mundungus Fletcher, the unpopular former headmaster Phineas Black who hated “muggle-
born” wizards and witches, the Death Eater Amycus Carrow and – again – Voldemort.
In the Order of the Phoenix we find no male shrieks at all.
There are less such connotations for female characters it seems, as J.K. Rowling has heroic and
positively regarded female character such as Hermoine or Ginny, Professor McGonagall,
Madam Hooch or Madam Pomfrey shriek as well as antagonists such as Harry’s abusive aunt
Petunia and Bellatrix Lestrange.
Looking at every shriek in the Harry Potter fanfiction corpus revealed that they came from
antagonistic Draco Malfoy as well as from protagonist Harry Potter himself, James Potter and
the bully Crabbe (results that were not returned during the original “*he shrieked” query).
Interestingly, there is one line stating that “Narcissa shrieked untypically” – while she does
“shriek” in the original novel series.
While female character still “shriek” more often in fanfiction than male characters, there seems
to be less of a moral connotation for male characters.
The generic fanfiction corpus sees positive male characters shriek as well, for example Dustin
in a Stranger Things fanfiction and Leonard McCoy in Star Trek fanfiction as well as others. In
 17

this regard once again, Harry Potter fanfiction shares more elements with other fanfiction than
with the “canon” material.

Discussion

The original question of this paper – whether fanfiction writers prefer to imitate the style of the
author of the original work or whether fanfiction has developed its own linguistic markers –
must be revisited under consideration of these results. It seems that the driving force behind the
linguistic choices is the attempt to create an authentic and consistent tone by adopting language
befitting the setting of the original work, even if it is not always successfully implemented there.
On the other hand, there are tendencies to use language the way J.K. Rowling does – even
language not specific to the setting such as “Muggles” or “Hogwarts” would be – but even here
the fanfiction corpora are more similar to each other than the Harry Potter fanfiction corpus is
to the Harry Potter novels.
One promising use of fanfiction addressed in the introduction were the ambitions to use
fanfiction to teach English.
Especially Grazzi formulated the hope that fanfiction would create a space in which native
speakers of English and learners could work together using the English language as common
ground.
The research into language conventions used in Harry Potter fanfiction as written on
archiveofourown.org makes this ambition seem promising. While the percentage of fanfiction
written in the English language is slightly below average for Harry Potter, English is still the
most common language for fanfiction writers on this website and more than 90% of all Harry
Potter fanfictions are written in English.
Furthermore, language is consciously used to create an authentic setting for the fanfiction. This
suggests that when using fanfiction as an educational tool, it is promising to use works with
very specific or unfamiliar language as it motivates the writers to learn to understand and to
adopt this choice of language. Implementing the British English varieties of the original work
creates an additional motivation to interact with the language and to learn the differences
between different varieties of English (even if the analysis of the Harry Potter fanfiction Corpus
indicates that the British English vocabulary is not always implemented successfully).
The findings in regard to gender of characters and the language used in correlation with
them opens an interesting insight into female writing in general – because as my survey shows,
the vast majority of fanfiction writers is female - male fanfiction writers are outnumbered even
 18

by people identifying neither as male nor as female and yet, male characters receive far more
“speaking time” than female characters both in “canon” and in fanfiction. Of course, this might
not hold true for fanfiction written for a canon work where female protagonists outnumber male
protagonists. On the other hand, fanfiction seems to be less concerned with maintaining the
stereotypical masculinity of male characters than the original work - which supports the claims
of Anne Kustriz, that one of the appeals of fanfiction is the opportunity to remove constraints
of the masculinity that male characters perform in published fiction which might limit them in
their agency (Kustritz, 2003, pp. 374-375).

Conclusion

English is the language that the vast majority of fanfiction is written in – at least 94% of
fanfiction on archiveofourown.org is written in English. While the tendency to write in a
language other than English is above average among Harry Potter fanfiction writers, it is still
the language used in 91% of the works. These numbers do not reflect the exact ratio of English
to non-English fanfiction nevertheless. For one, works are translated from one language into
another and some works written in a language other than English (Archiveofourown.org, 2018)
might not be “original” works at all. Furthermore, there are communities like FanFiktion.de or
fanfictions.fr or efpfanfic.net where fanfictions are posted in German, French or Italian and
while archiveofourown.org and fanfiction.net might give insight into the international
fanfiction community and were often the subject of previous research work into fanfiction,
future research might reveal new aspects by looking into these smaller databases specifically
writing for one language community.
One can also conclude from these results that the English variety of the original work is
imitated by the fanfiction writers to create an authentic setting, but other stylistic choices or
restrictions are treated with much greater flexibility, especially when it comes to the use of
language describing or suggesting sexual themes. Future research could potentially analyse how
this holds true for fanfiction set in a non-English country or settings which see characters
speaking in dialects or accents less accessible to a modern writer (such as historical settings).
Regarding sentence length, word length and difficulty level of the chosen vocabulary, the
style of Harry Potter fanfiction has far more in common with other fanfiction than with the
original work. Further research could focus on other fandoms and the question whether this
holds true for them as well - and how this reflects the demographic backgrounds of fanfiction
writers.
 19

Looking more deeply into subjects such as the representation of gender in fanfiction writing
revealed that for one, female characters get less opportunity to speak both in fanfiction and in
canon material, which might be surprising considering the stark prevalence of female authors
among fanfiction writers. On the other hand, there is a notable disparity when it comes to the
portrayal of masculinity in fanfiction which – while it has been researched and theorised about
under other, more content-related aspects – might be interesting to study focussing on other
linguistic markers.
 20

References
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Translations: https://archiveofourown.org/faq/languages-and-translations?language_id=en

Black, R. (2006, Vol. 3). Language, Culture, and Identity in Online Fanfiction. E-Learning, pp. 170-184.

Black, R. W. (2007, Vol 4). Fanfiction Writing and the Construction of Space. E–Learning, p. 390.

Bolt, W. L. (5 2004). The Hidden Authors: A Study and Survey of Fan Fiction Writers. Trace: Tennessee
Research and Creative Exchange.

Council of Chief State School Officers, N. G. (25. 9 2018). Corestandards. Von Supplemental
Information for Appendix A of the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts
and Literacy: New Research on Text Complexity:
http://www.corestandards.org/assets/E0813_Appendix_A_New_Research_on_Text_Comple
xity.pdf abgerufen

Darragh, G. (2000). A to Zed A to Zee: A Guide to the Differences between British and American
English. Irun.

Grazzi, E. (2015). Linking ELF and ELT in Secondary School through Web-Mediation: The Case of
Fanfiction. In H. Bowles, International Perspectives on English as a Lingua Franca (pp. 55-67).
London.

Harris, T. (1988). The Silence of the Lambs. New York.

Herzing, M. J. (2005). The Internet World of Fan Fiction. Richmond. Retrieved 9 25, 2018, from
https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/51291784.pdf

Jamison, A. (2015). Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over The World. Dallas.

Jwa, S. (2012, Vol. 29). Modeling L2 Writer Voice: Discoursal Positioning in Fanfiction Writing.
Computers and Composition, 323-340.

Kustritz, A. (2003, Vol. 26). Slashing the Romance Narrative. The Journal of American Culture, pp. 371-
384.

Renfro, K. (2. 2 2018). Why devoted 'Harry Potter' fans feel betrayed by J.K. Rowling and the
'Fantastic Beasts' franchise. Insider.

Rowling, J. (1997). Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. London.

Rowling, J. (1998). Harry Potter and The Chamber of Secrets. London.

Rowling, J. (1999). Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. London.

Rowling, J. (2000). Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. London.

Rowling, J. (2003). Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. London.

Rowling, J. (2005). Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. London.

Rowling, J. (2007). Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

Seuss, T. (1957). How the Grinch stole Christmas. New York.

Shelley, M. (1818). Frankenstein, Or, The Modern Prometheus. Oxford, Newyork.

 21

Sophia Ananiadou, J. M. (2012). The English Language in the Digital Age. Series., META-NET White
Paper Series.

Steege, D. K. (2002). Harry Potter, Tom Brown, and the British School Story: Lost in Transit? In L. A.
Whited, The Ivory Tower and Harry Potter: Perspectives on a Literary Phenomenon (S. 140-
159). Columbia, London.

Thomas, B. (2011, Vol. 3). What Is Fanfiction and Why Are People Saying Such Nice Things About It?
Storyworlds: A Journal of Narrative Studies, 1-24.

Tosenberger, C. (2008, Vol. 38). Homosexuality at the Online Hogwarts: Harry Potter Slash Fanfiction.
Children's Literature, 185-207.

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Literature Association, pp. 4-27.
 22

Appendix

Chart 1: Queries

Harry HP Corpus FF Corpus

Potter
armour 30 4 3
arse 0 126 6
arsehole 0 6 0
asked 505 894 607
asked 505 894 607
ass 0 14 113
asshole 0 2 29
barked 3 2 1 (-the times it was used for a
dog)
bellend 0 1 0
bin 56 4 3
blighter 0 1 0
Blimey 31 6 0
bloody hell 0 32 0
bollocks 0 10 0
bugger 0 20 0
center 0 30 30
centre 37 12 10
color 0 20 26
colour 38 36 11
favorite 0 30 38
favourite 56 25 6
fuck* 0 498 513
gay 0 61 37
git 15 35 0
gray 0 22 18
grey 84 80 42
half-moon glasses 5 1 0
half-moon spectacles 17 0 0
he answered 3 13 7
he asked 81 151 115
he said 792 458 310
he shouted 33 13 3
he shrieked 3 1 0
he whined 1 4 4
he whispered 33 60 32
he yelled 21 6 7
in # street 6 1 1
licence 3 0 1
license 0 2 6
 23

licorice 0 1 2
liquorice 4 2 0
offence 5 1 3
offense 0 4 6
on # street 0 2 11
pajamas 0 3 6
pyjamas 25 11 1
rubbish 38 14 1
said 8566 2638 1812
said 8566 2636 1812
sceptic* 10 6 1
shag/shagged 0 35 0
she answered 3 8 4
she asked 14 97 59
she said 312 245 208
she shouted 6 3 3
she shrieked 7 2 2
she whined 0 3 0
she whispered 20 28 24
she yelled 0 2 3
shouted 207 68 30
skeptic* 0 10 5
trash 0 7 7
whispered 254 223 129
yelled 158 40 35
yer 96 1 20

Chart 2: Demographic Survey conducted September 2018 among random Tumblr-users who write
fanfiction.

Age Gender Education writing for Age Language

Harry Potter group
1 17 male High School No <20 GER
2 17 female High School Yes <20 ENG
3 17 female High School Yes <20 ENG
4 18 female Undergraduate No <20 ENG
5 18 male High School Yes <20 ENG
6 18 non- High School Yes <20 ENG
binary
7 18 female Undergraduate No <20 ENG
8 18 female Undergraduate No <20 ENG
9 19 female High School No <20 ENG
10 19 non- Undergraduate Yes <20 ENG
binary
11 20 female Undergraduate No 20-30 ENG
12 21 male Undergraduate No 20-30 ENG
 24

13 21 female Undergraduate No 20-30 ENG

14 21 non- B.A. No 20-30 ENG
binary
15 21 female M.A. Yes 20-30 ENG
16 21 female Undergraduate Yes 20-30 ENG
17 21 female Undergraduate Yes 20-30 ENG
18 21 female Undergraduate No <20 ENG
19 22 female No 20-30 ENG
20 22 female Undergraduate No 20-30 ENG
21 22 female High School Yes 20-30 ENG
22 22 non- B.A. Yes 20-30 ENG
binary
23 22 female B.A. Yes 20-30 ENG
24 23 female* High School No 20-30 ENG
25 23 male Undergraduate No 20-30 ENG
26 23 female B.A. No 20-30 ENG
27 24 female Undergraduate No 20-30 ENG
28 24 female Undergraduate No 20-30 ENG
29 24 female Undergraduate Yes 20-30 ENG
30 25 female Undergraduate No 20-30 ENG
31 25 female M.A. No 20-30 ENG
32 25 female B.A. No 20-30 ENG
33 26 non- Undergraduate Yes 20-30 ENG
binary
34 26 female B.A. Yes 20-30 ENG
35 28 female M.A. No 20-30 ENG
36 29 female B.A. No 20-30 ENG
37 30 female M.A. No >30 ENG
38 31 female M.A. No >30 ENG
39 31 female M.A. Yes >30 ENG
40 32 female M.A. No >30 ENG
41 32 female High School No >30 ENG
42 32 female* M.A. Yes >30 ENG
43 32 female B.A. Yes >30 ENG
44 33 female M.A. Yes >30 ENG
45 34 female High School No >30 ENG
46 35 female B.A. No >30 ENG
47 35 female B.A. No >30 ENG
48 36 female B.A. No >30 ENG
49 38 female* M.A. No >30 ENG
50 43 non- M.A. Yes >30 ENG
binary
 25

Chart 3: Readability and Complexity of the Corpora used for this research as analysed with ATOS
(with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Thomas Harris’ The Silence of the Lambs and Dr. Seuss’ How the
Grinch Stole Christmas for comparison)

Harry Harry Potter Generic Silence of the Frankenstein How the

Potter Fanfiction Fanfiction Lambs Grinch
Stole
Christmas
ATOS Level: 6,6 6 6,1 5,6 9,5 3,3
Average 4,4 4,3 4,3 4,3 4,4 4
Word
Length:
Average 14,1 12,5 12,5 11,1 19,6 8,1
Sentence
Length:
Average 5,1 5,4 5,4 4,7 5,5 2,3
Vocabulary
Level: