more lolguistics

i don't know whether i should promise that this will be my last post on lolcats, because there has been a flurry of new content about it recently. a surprisingly large group of people have taken interest in actual linguistic analysis of the lolcat idiom. the latest comes from David McRaney at Zero Sum Mind. the fact that his article concludes with this chart indicates the seriousness of his study of lolcats and related memes:

The great thing about all of this is how we can see new languages forming out of a new medium, and since the pace is abnormally fast, we can watch it evolve over weeks instead of decades.

these are, of course, constructed dialects, not actually languages. terminology aside, this is a fascinating opportunity who are interested in dialect and language change.

It also demonstrates how the Internet changes the way we connect and communicate. These words and macros depend on the users manipulating not only the information being passed back and forth, but the format of the codes we agree on to represent the information. Strunk and White would probably be appalled...

the linguists hope for nothing less.