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posted by martyb on Tuesday September 23 2014, @02:13PM   Printer-friendly
from the watts-in-a-whirred? dept.

Britt Peterson writes at The Atlantic that when Eric Nakagawa and Kari Unebasami created the site I Can Has Cheezburger?, in 2007, to share cat photos with funny, misspelled captions, they probably weren’t thinking about long-term sociolinguistic implications. Seven years later, the “cheezpeep” community is still active online, chattering away in Lolspeak, its own distinctive variety of English, resembling a down-South baby talk with some very strange characteristics, including deliberate misspellings (teh, ennyfing), unique verb forms (gotted, can haz), and word reduplication (fastfastfast). To a linguist, all of this sounds a lot like a sociolect: a language variety that’s spoken within a social group, like Valley Girl–influenced ValSpeak or African American Vernacular English.

Like Lolspeak, other Internet sociolects tend to start as a game or a kind of insider-y one-upmanship, then snowball in complexity and according to Susan Herring, a linguist at Indiana University at Bloomington, they have another important function: they can generate words that spill into the broader lexicon. In 2011, for example, the Concise Oxford English Dictionary added woot, from the hacker sociolect leetspeak. In addition to Lolspeak, Internet sociolects include leetspeak created by hackers and wannabes (n00bs) trying to disguise their bulletin-board messages in the 1980s (1337 h4x0r for “elite hacker”; ph33r t3h phr3ak for “fear the phreak”); Martian used by Chinese bloggers to bypass government censors with phonetic spellings and archaic Chinese characters and characters borrowed from Japanese, Korean, and Latin scripts (Drě@m‰ for “dream”; 520 for “I love you”); and Dogespeak, tongue-in-cheek impersonators of the Shiba Inu dog breed, which started spreading on Reddit and Tumblr in 2012 inspired a cryptocurrency, Dogecoin (“very currency—many coin—wow”). Because online sociolects develop so quickly, and leave such an extensive record, they offer linguists a chance to observe linguistic change with a precision that would be impossible for an oral dialect. Herring eagerly awaits the next wave of sociolects. “These are almost certainly out there,” says Herring. “We just haven’t discovered them yet.”

One would be remiss to omit the Jargon File (aka The Hacker's Dictionary.)

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  • (Score: 3) by gman003 on Tuesday September 23 2014, @02:20PM

    by gman003 (4155) on Tuesday September 23 2014, @02:20PM (#97160)

    This is why I love science - even the stupidest things humanity can come up with, they can take and get some new knowledge out of. I could probably fart into a megaphone and a physicist would discover a new bit of acoustics by listening to it.

    • (Score: 5, Funny) by mrclisdue on Tuesday September 23 2014, @05:31PM

      by mrclisdue (680) on Tuesday September 23 2014, @05:31PM (#97258)

      I could probably fart into a megaphone and a physicist would discover a new bit of acoustics by listening to it.

      Too late, it was iphorced into your itunes last week: U2's Song of Innocence.

      cheers,

  • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 23 2014, @02:23PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 23 2014, @02:23PM (#97161)

    My dog at the time was beside me constantly, begging me to go out and play. It was f* annoying!

    So I started to intersperse my posts with Barji-isms. I was wearing earplugs and couldn't hear too well so I heard them as woot. But the 'o' key was kinda stuck and the numeric keypad was handy so I typed it as w00t.

    Somehow that caught on.

  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by Lee_Dailey on Tuesday September 23 2014, @02:53PM

    by Lee_Dailey (4438) on Tuesday September 23 2014, @02:53PM (#97178)

    howdy y'all,

    in addition to the stuff posted above, there is always this ...
    Chronogram from mrob27, origin: NP1720; destination: NP2111
    - http://forums.xkcd.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=101043&start=84400#p3656107 [xkcd.com]

    that's from this thread ...
    xkcd • View topic - 1190: "Time"
    - http://forums.xkcd.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=101043 [xkcd.com]

    they have developed their own jargon and it's diverged far enuf that only the insiders seem to understand it. [*grin*]

    take care,
    lee

    • (Score: 2) by Woods on Tuesday September 23 2014, @04:03PM

      by Woods (2726) <woods12@gmail.com> on Tuesday September 23 2014, @04:03PM (#97202) Journal

      Ahhh Time, what a great moment. Randall made a comic that changes over time, but ended up with a religion and a language.

      • (Score: 1) by Lee_Dailey on Saturday September 27 2014, @06:20PM

        by Lee_Dailey (4438) on Saturday September 27 2014, @06:20PM (#98939)

        howdy Woods (2726),

        2114 pages in the thread and still going ever onward ... [*grin*]

        take care,
        lee

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Tuesday September 23 2014, @03:36PM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday September 23 2014, @03:36PM (#97190)

    "resembling a down-South baby talk with some very strange characteristics, including deliberate misspellings, unique verb forms, and word reduplication"

    Its not cheezeburger, I recognize that as CB radio talk. If you don't have a general coverage rx capable of listening (if not actual CB gear?), just watch a trucker movie from the late 70s, the peak of the civilian CB craze.

    Pretty much everyone on CB sounds like that complete with fake southern accent.

    I'd translate "deliberate misspellings" as trying to sound all southern on the CB, and those idiots with intentional distortion boxes and bad (non)linear amplifier clipping and echo chambers and roger beeps.

    "unique verb forms" means the f word (and what moron started calling it the f bomb?) is used for all verbs. And many nouns, adjectives, etc.

    Word duplication is its a CB thing to repeat yourself. More of a drunken ramble thing.

    It may be a human primate thing that you drop a bunch of average joes on an isolated island and they all start sounding like CB-ers or LOLcat-ers in a natural process. Parallel convergent evolution or whatever.

  • (Score: 5, Informative) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Tuesday September 23 2014, @03:48PM

    by PizzaRollPlinkett (4512) on Tuesday September 23 2014, @03:48PM (#97196)

    If you have never seen the original jargon file, before it was ruined by "leet speak" and other pollution from groups that have nothing to do with actual hacking, I encourage you to find an older copy. They're still circulating online. You can experience the language the real hackers organically created.

    --
    (E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!)
    • (Score: 2) by darkfeline on Tuesday September 23 2014, @07:52PM

      by darkfeline (1030) on Tuesday September 23 2014, @07:52PM (#97321) Homepage

      Are you saying this http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/ [catb.org] is ruined by "leet speak"? It seems pretty authentic to me, although it feels more like the hacker language (e.g., old Berkeley MIT) than the phreaker language (the old BBS, Bell, dark side), if that's the distinction you were making.

      --
      Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
  • (Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 23 2014, @04:19PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 23 2014, @04:19PM (#97207)

    One interesting jargon file was maintained for a while by Mike Cowlishaw of IBM (he's probably best known for creating the Rexx programming language). It was a dictionary of IBM speak (e.g. DASD (pronouced dazdee) for a hard disk drive; abbrev of direct access storage device; or "bounce" to reboot a computer or terminate and restart a process). The interesting thing is how this lingo was so widely used within IBM and largely unused outside (with the exception of some large IBM mainframe customers).

    • (Score: 2) by MrGuy on Tuesday September 23 2014, @04:46PM

      by MrGuy (1007) on Tuesday September 23 2014, @04:46PM (#97226)

      Come to think of it, you've also described the Rexx programming language.

      • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 23 2014, @04:56PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 23 2014, @04:56PM (#97234)

        Actually, Rexx was very popular on the Amiga.

    • (Score: 2) by Woods on Wednesday September 24 2014, @02:01PM

      by Woods (2726) <woods12@gmail.com> on Wednesday September 24 2014, @02:01PM (#97659) Journal

      Do people not use the word "Bounce"? The only two ways I suggest a service/server/system restart is by saying either "Bounce it" or "Have you tried turning it off, and back on again"? I thought everyone used "Bounce".