#internet language

allthingslinguistic:

stanzicapparatireplayers:

anemotionallyunstablecreature:

a6:

u kno when u keysmash but the jumble of letters dont convery the right Feeling so u gotta backspace and re-keysmash to turn ur HKELSXPXA to a JKFSDKAS

Vaguely wondering how future anthropologists will explain this…

*raises hand* Hi. So - the use of a keysmash is emotive. You use it to indicate that you’re so overwhelmed with emotion that you can’t even type, you’re just flailing at the keyboard.

So why is there a difference between a “hkelsxpxa” and a “jkfsdkas” or an “asdfs”?

Because language evolves! It’s actually really exciting to think about, but there’s a reason why slang is continually changing and why Old People are usually characterized by not knowing the slang variants that are being used by The Youth - it’s because the way we use words changes over time, especially in response to technological or environmental changes.

And text-based communication - texting someone on your phone, or chatting with friends on Skype or Discord - is actually really new, this is something which started in my lifetime. And grammatical rules have been evolving and settling into place around that form of communication.

For instance, linguistic researchers have noticed that anyone who’s grown up with texting being a normal thing will usually not end their texts or IMs with a period unless they’re angry or annoyed. This is because it’s a lot harder to do a run-on sentence in those mediums; you can just hit ‘enter’ and go to a new line. A period, then, becomes an indicator of emphasis, instead of an indicator of “there is nothing missing from this sentence” - and it’s an indicator of negative emphasis (rather than the positive emphasis that an exclaimation mark can give).

So, the keysmash has its own grammatical rule. And it’s one that makes sense, considering that it’s entirely possible for a keysmash to be caused accidentally - by something falling onto the keyboard, or a cat walking across it. The rule, then, is that a deliberate keysmash and an accidental one need to be distinguishable.

So a deliberate keysmash will nearly always use keys only in the home row, and usually in a particular order that isn’t likely to have happened purely accidentally.

So, future anthropologists will likely explain it as a marker of language evolving to work with a text-based medium where expressions and body language are difficult-to-impossible to convey. Much like emojis, crytyping, and whether or not you put punctuation at the end of a sentence (and in what context you do so), keysmashing is used to convey how you feel - in a way that body language and facial expressions would usually be expected to fill in the gap.

I did a survey once of people who use keysmash and over half of people reported that they’d adjust a few letters or delete and re-smash when it didn’t look “right” (except for the poor Dvorak users, who had kind of given up on keysmash entirely because their vowely home row made theirs emotionally illegible to other people).

anthrocentric:

kingoftheunderground:

kingoftheunderground:

cakesoup:

kingoftheunderground:

kingoftheunderground:

kingoftheunderground:

kingoftheunderground:

I work at a coffee shop and have gotten all my co-workers to start calling lattes “hot milkybois”

I also got everyone to refer to the salted caramel blended drink as “the big salty” and I consider it one of my greatest accomplishments

Oh yeah and any time someone orders a hazelnut latte with almond milk (which specifically is a weirdly popular drink) I say “one HOT NUT latte coming right up!”

My coworkers have not latched on to this one like they did with the others for some reason.

I forgot to mention I also pronounce “hot chocolate” like “hot cocklate”… because I’m awful.

please give us updates

Our largest drink size is affectionately referred to as “Texas Size” so sometimes when I hand it out in the drive-thru I like to say, “Here’s that TEXAS SIZE [drink] for ya, YEEEEHAW!”

And some people look at me as though I have just made their entire day while others look like they they could not possibly get away from me soon enough. Both reactions are equally satisfying. 

I made this into a game except when I hand out the Texas-size drinks I say “Can I get a YEEHAW?” And the guests always look mortified but occasionally one of them will let out a terrified “yeehaw” and all my coworkers cheer and then we keep a running tally of how many yeehaws we each get on the back of a pastry bag.

This person is reinventing Diner Lingo

thereallieutenantcommanderdata:

missalsfromiram:

yeli-renrong:

One of the interesting linguistic effects of the internet is that sound changes can propagate regardless of geography – like, I’m seeing Australians on Youtube who have GenAm æ-breaking

Notregardless of geography, I bet - these YouTubers are regularly co-producing videos with, talking to, and visiting Americans, I’m guessing? I don’t want to launch into my whole spiel about how there’s no evidence that mass media has caused any changes in the phonology of English dialects, so I’ll just say I greatly doubt, based on what we’ve seen in the 140 years since the invention of artificial sound reproduction, that anyone will be picking up an American accent from passively watching YouTube videos.

And I don’t remember where I read it, but it’s apparently a principle, based on an appeal to Occam’s Razor, in at least some circles of historical linguistics that internal explanations should always be sought first before looking to contact - and it is true that /æ/ is historically unstable in English. Could it simply be that some Australians have independently started breaking /æ/, and some of them happen to be YouTubers?

Also, Youtube is an international medium - a person who posts videos on Youtube is intentionally seeking to communicate with people outside of their local community or even their country.  So, it may well be that they’re consciously adopting American pronunciations specifically in the context of producing Youtube videos.

When talking to their local friends and neighbors, it’s quite possible that they don’t have those Americanized pronunciations.  Their Youtube videos are likely a biased sample of their speech.

grevgrev:

allthingslinguistic:

tumblinguistics:

I finally managed to get hold of a copy of my dissertation! You can read it on Google Docs HERE. Please feel free to download and cite the work if it helps you with your own studies. :)

You guys, this is 70 pages of analysis of tumblr language and you should probably read it. I know I’m going to.

I’m sold on the strength of the table of contents alone

dogs-ruletheworld:

aeternanoxfleuret:

itpuddle:

saying yo and yall in the same sentence is a sign of a chaotic neutral vocabulary

yo’ll

@redvelvetnerd

linguisten:

“People often write online messages as if they’re speaking. [David] Crystal traces that to a period of linguistic ‘free love’ in the 1990s, when breaking the rules online was encouraged, and punctuation was one way to do it. John McWhorter, a linguistics professor at Columbia University, thinks that it’s part of a long-term cultural shift toward an increasingly oral society. If formal writing is language in its Sunday best, the linguistic fashion in digital communication is distressed jeans, frayed at the hem. As the linguist Ben Zimmer says, people often punctuate creatively to express their tone of voice and their mood. Even Lynne Truss, who insists on precision in punctuation in her Eats, Shoots & Leaves, says that she starts all of her emails with a yell. Instead of ‘Dear George,’ for instance, she writes ‘George!”

—The Quotable Guide to Punctuationby Stephen Spector

allthingslinguistic:

“The Archive of Our Own has none of these problems. It uses a third tagging system, one that blends the best elements of both styles. On AO3, users can put in whatever tags they want (autocomplete is there to help, but they don’t have to use it). Then, behind the scenes, human volunteers look up any new tags that no one else has used before and match them with any applicable existing tags, a process known as tag wrangling. Wrangling means that you don’t need to know whether the most popular tag for your new fanfic featuring Sherlock Holmes and John Watson is Johnlock or Sherwatson or John/Sherlock or Sherlock/John or Holmes/Watson or anything else. And you definitely don’t need to tag your fic with all of them just in case. Instead, you pick whichever one you like, the tag wranglers do their work behind the scenes, and readers looking for any of these synonyms will still be able to find you. AO3’s trick is that it involves humans by design—around 350 volunteer tag wranglers in 2019, up from 160 people in 2012—who each spend a few hours a week deciding whether new tags should be treated as synonyms or subsets of existing tags, or simply left alone. AO3’s Tag Wrangling Chairs estimate that the group is on track to wrangle over 2 million never-before-used tags in 2019, up from around 1.5 million in 2018. Laissez-faire and rigid tagging systems both fail because they assume too much—that users can create order from a completely open system, or that a predefined taxonomy can encompass every kind of tag a person might ever want. When these assumptions don’t pan out, it always seems to be the user’s fault. AO3’s beliefs about human nature are more pragmatic, like an architect designing pathways where pedestrians have begun wearing down the grass, recognizing how variation and standardization can fit together. The wrangler system is one where ordinary user behavior can be successful, a system which accepts that users periodically need help from someone with a bird’s-eye view of the larger picture. Users appreciate this help. According to Tag Wrangling Chair briar_pipe, “We sometimes get users who come from Instagram or Tumblr or another unmoderated site. We can tell that they’re new to AO3 because they tag with every variation of a concept—abbreviations, different word order, all of it. I love how excited people get when they realize they don’t have to do that here.””

—

Gretchen McCulloch, Fans Are Better Than Tech at Organizing Information Online 

(My latest Wired column is up and it’s about AO3 and taxonomies!)