go read :The Linguistics of LOL
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What Internet vernacular reveals about the evolution of language
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When two friends created the site I Can Has Cheezburger?, in 2007, to share cat photos with funny, misspelled captions, it was a way of cheering themselves up. They probably werenât thinking about long-term sociolinguistic implications. But seven years later, the âcheezpeepâ community is still active online, chattering away in lolspeak, its own distinctive variety of English. lolspeak was meant to sound like the twisted language inside a catâs brain, and has ended up 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). It can be difficult to master. One user writes that it used to take at least 10 minutes âto read adn unnerstandâ a paragraph. (âNao, itâz almost like a sekund lanjuaje.â) To a linguist, all of this sounds a lot like a sociolect: a language variety thatâs spoken within a social group, like Valley Girlâinfluenced ValTalk or African American Vernacular English. (The word dialect, by contrast, commonly refers to a variety spoken by a geographic groupâthink Appalachian or Lumbee.) Over the past 20 years, online sociolects have been springing up around the world, from Jejenese in the Philippines to Ali G Language, a British lingo inspired by the Sacha Baron Cohen character. Thereâs also Padonkaffsky, an aughts-era slang beloved by Russiaâs self-described âscumâ (they call themselves Padonkiâa garbling of podonok, the actual Russian word for âscumâ), with phonetic spellings, offensive language, and a popular meme involving outdoor sex and an inopportune bear. Israel has Fakatsa, a sociolect beloved by teen girlsâterms from which have popped up on baby clothes and menstrual-pain products. (via The Linguistics of LOL - Britt Peterson - The Atlantic)
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