Following on from my earlier piece, there is a rather nice contrasting article from the BBC (or Aunty as the slang goes) all about one of the most prolific sources of new slang: the Internet. The BBC article, entitled How the Internet is changing language, refers to such terms as app, short for digital application (some of which we at Macmillan have just launched ourselves!), and also mentions the site I can haz cheezeburger aka ‘Lolcats’. ‘Lolcats’ is my site of choice when I need cheering up. More interesting though, from a linguistic point of view, is the dialect that these cats ‘speak’. It feels a bit cockney and a bit Asian in nature – have a look and see what you think.
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Yeah, I know what you mean about the way lolcats speak but I think a lot of the contributions come from the US, so maybe it’s a bit like their street-speak.
i agree with kasparova
Maybe cats in the US are just that little bit funkier than in the UK…?
Thank you for blogging about this. This is such an interesting topic. Something else that’s related to internet slang that I saw on YouTube today was this video at:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qljbvTqScgY. You should also check out a related blog post on taking advantage of using internet slang. Here’s the link: http://www.joshrimer.com/internet-slang-matters/.
Lolcats sure know how to cheer people up!!!
Lolcats isn’t anything like US street speech. Good theory, though! It’s a language in and of itself. We sometimes imitate it for humorous effect, so it may find its way INTO our speech, rather than the other way around. It was invented to imitate the way a non-native speaker, such as…a cat…might speak English.