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.”
The Linguistics of Lolspeak
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.”
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