Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language

by Gretchen McCulloch

Even keysmash, that haphazard mashing of fingers against keyboard to signal a feeling so intense that you can’t possibly type real words, has patterns. A typical keysmash might look like “asdljklgafdljk” or “asdfkfjas;dfI”—quite distinct from, say, a cat walking across the keyboard, which might look like “tfgggggggggggggggggggsxdzzzzzzzz.”

It would be a waste to use the short, versatile monosyllable “of” for the relatively uncommon concept of an odd-toed ungulate. Similarly, if we assigned the meaning of “of” to a sequence of sounds as long as “rhinoceros,” it would be a clear drop in efficiency.

In speech, we often make language more efficient by dropping unnecessary syllables or squishing sounds together, even if it’s not writable. We truncate words without regard for spelling: you can say the first syllable of “usual” or “casual” and everyone knows what you mean, but do you write it “yooj”? “uzh”? “cazh”? “casj”? It’s simply not clear, but speech proceeds merrily along anyway.

They wrote only words, a mere aid to the memory of the reader, who had to infuse them with life again on saying them. Gradually, over the centuries, we began adding punctuation and other typographical enhancements.

If you studied French or German in school, it’s easy to think that they’re each a single, unitary language, but that’s just the formal version: the maps showcase how these languages are truly constellations of dialects, hundreds of varieties that differ slightly from village to village.

On the Dictionary of American Regional English site, you can scroll through a “Word Wheel” of interesting vocabulary items, from “Adam’s housecat” to “zydeco.”

a later study by Eisenstein and colleagues found that the abbreviation “ikr” (“I know, right?”) was especially popular in Detroit, the emoticon ^_^ (happy) was characteristic of Southern California, and the spelling “suttin” (“something”) was popular in New York City.

But every generation has talked slightly differently from its parents: otherwise, we’d all still be talking like Shakespeare.

William Labov estimated that women lead 90 percent of linguistic change in a paper he wrote in 1990.

with other demographic factors like age and race. Sometimes whole groups defied gender norms—men overall tended to swear more, but techies, a cluster that was male-dominated, didn’t swear much at all, presumably because they were using Twitter as an extension of the workplace. At the individual level, people followed the norms of their clusters rather than their genders—a woman in the sports cluster or a man in the parenting cluster tweeted like their fellow sports fans or parents, rather than like an “average woman” or “average man.”

more weak ties also lead to more linguistic change.

This means that, despite the fact that it’s technically written in Old English rather than Old Icelandic, Icelanders would have an easier time learning to read Beowulf than would modern English speakers.

If everyone you know already knows each other, your only source of new linguistic forms is random variation—you don’t have any weak ties to borrow from.

It’s not an accident that Twitter, where you’re encouraged to follow people you don’t already know, has given rise to more linguistic innovation (not to mention memes and social movements) than Facebook, where you primarily friend people you already know offline.

We all make linguistic decisions like this all the time. Sometimes, we decide to align ourselves with the existing holders of power by talking like they do, so we can seem rich or educated or upwardly mobile. Sometimes, we decide to align ourselves with particular less powerful groups, to show that we belong and to seem cool, antiauthoritarian, or not stuck-up.

R in itself is neither good nor bad: its meaning, and the meaning of the accents that do or do not have it, is constructed by society.

Lowth gave us an early suggestion against the sentence-ending preposition: “This is an Idiom which our language is strongly inclined to; it prevails in common conversation, and suits very well with the familiar style in writing; but the placing of the Preposition before the Relative is more graceful, as well as more perspicuous; and agrees much better with the solemn and elevated Style.” Lowth himself wasn’t completely against it (after all, he used it himself in “strongly inclined to”), just passing an aesthetic judgment.

Many languages can’t have spelling bees because their spelling systems are so logical that no one would ever get knocked out.

I expect that if we looked at which names are found in autocorrect and autocomplete, we’d find that typical English names would be well represented and names from other languages less so. At a societal level, it’s a case of bias-laundering through technology that serves to reinforce people and names that are already powerful.

Of course, when a word like “lit” or “bae” gets sufficiently associated with mainstream culture—and especially when it gets picked up by brands capitalizing on trends—it then loses its appeal to hip insiders, prompting the cycle to begin again.

Several studies show that people who use a lot of internet abbreviations perform, at worst, just as well on spelling tests, formal essays, and other measures of literacy as people who never use abbreviations—and sometimes even better.

The fact that all but one of the new, informal versions is longer than the older words (two syllables instead of one) puts an immediate question mark by any assumption that the new forms could be a sign of laziness. But further, the fact that teens deploy this mix of formal and informal styles in writing suggests that what they’re doing is neither an imperfect transcript of casual speech nor a failed attempt at formal writing. Internet writing is a distinct genre with its own goals, and to accomplish those goals successfully requires subtly tuned awareness of the full spectrum of the language.

Herring also points to a French sociology study from 1981, which found that sociability is highest among teenagers and young adults, and declines as people get older.

The first thing McSweeney and her collaborators noticed is that “lol” only appears once per phrase:

/ my mom was annoyed when I said it lol.” The other thing she noticed is that “lol” occurs with certain types of emotions, like flirting, requesting or offering empathy, alluding to undisclosed information, repairing a previous message, or softening a confrontation, but not with others, like expressing love, exchanging information, and small talk—people

On the other side of the age divide, Posts often assume that because older people in their lives seem to be familiar with Facebook and texting, they also share certain baseline assumptions about the meanings of associated communicative signals like “lol” and punctuation marks. The dot dot dot is especially perilous. For people with experience of informal writing offline, it’s a generic separation character, as we just saw. But for internet-oriented writers, the generic separator is the linebreak or new message, which has left the dot dot dot open to taking on a further meaning of something left unsaid.

This is efficient in a digital medium, where scrolling down is easy and unbounded: not a waste of pixels the way it might be a waste of paper. Linebreaks come for free: they don’t take up any more bytes than a period and a space, and they add a lot in readability. Both “new line” and “send message” take a single keystroke, often the same enter key, so the muscle memory is easy. Plus, it helps the conversation flow better if you hit “send” after every utterance rather than waiting and sending a whole essay: the reader can start thinking of a reply sooner.

This, too, has a logic to it: while some kinds of punctuation are traditionally reserved for joining full clauses (periods) and others for dependent clauses (commas), ellipses and dashes are deemed acceptable for joining both sorts, even in the most conservative styles. So if you’re writing informally and you don’t want to bother deciding whether your string of words is a full sentence or merely a clausal fragment, one way to split the difference is to punctuate ambiguously—to use an ellipsis or dash.

The dots must be indicating something left unsaid: “how’s it going [there’s something I’m not telling you].” From a peer, something left unsaid might indicate flirtation. But from an older relative, that would be weird. What other kinds of hidden messages are left? The most common assumptions are either passive aggression or sheer confusion.

She found that all caps made people judge happy messages as even happier (IT’S MY BIRTHDAY!!! feels happier than “It’s my birthday!!!”) but didn’t make sad messages any sadder (“i miss u” is just as sad as I MISS U). When it came to anger, the results were mixed: sometimes caps increased the anger rating and sometimes it didn’t, a result which Heath attributed to the difference between “hot” anger (FIGHT ME) and “cold” anger (“fight me”).

A single capped word, on the other hand, is simply EMPHATIC.

Another way to do emphasis online is by repeatingggggg letterrrrssss, especially for emotive words like “yayyyy” or “nooo.”

What’s cool about expressive lengthening is that, although it started as a very literal representation of longer sounds, it’s ended up creating a form of emotional expression that now has no possible spoken equivalent, making it more akin to its typographical cousins, all caps and italics.

The politeness literature offers a couple main strategies for being nice. One is to make an extra effort, using hedges, honorifics, or simply more words: “Doctor, could I possibly trouble you to open the window?” versus “Open the window!”

Many internet acronyms make polite hedges accessible even to slower typists, such as “btw” (by the way), “iirc” (if I recall correctly), “imo” (in my opinion), and “afaik” (as far as I know),

It’s well established that politeness decreases with power—you’re more polite to your boss than to your underling.

In comparison, exclamation marks indicated friendliness 32 percent of the time (“See you there!” “I hope this helps!”) and emphasized statements of fact another 29.5 percent of the time (“There’s still time to register!”).

The Japanese word for “yes” is written はい and pronounced “hai.” If you want to write the equivalent of “yesss” or “haiii” using tilde lengthening, you’d write “yes~~,” “hai~~,” or “はい〜〜

I did an informal poll on Twitter in 2016, asking, “When you write on your phone, do you ever undo the autocapitalization for the sake of aesthetic?” and the results were very clear: of the five hundred–plus people who replied, over half said that they do so all the time, with another third saying “sometimes” and only 14 percent saying “never.”

If you try talking with your hands tied down (recruit a friend to make sure you get untied!), you’ll probably have a hard time with it.

Even people who have been blind since birth do it, even when they’re talking with people who they know are also blind.

So linguists think that this other kind of gesture, called co-speech or illustrative gesture, is more about the thinking of the speaker than the understanding of the listener.

Sure enough, people who are encouraged to gesture do better at solving math problems and mental rotation.

People were bothered by variation in the form of the dancer emoji because it was serving as an emblem, and emblems add their own separate meaning to the words they go with. But people were unruffled by variation in the form of the birthday cake emoji because it’s an illustration, and illustrative emoji instead highlight and reinforce a topic that’s already present. It’s okay if illustrators aren’t quite exactly on target: the surrounding words will provide enough context to interpret them correctly.

The vast majority of messages were text only. Of the ones that contained emoji at all, the vast majority put them alongside words. And of the messages that were only emoji, the majority were just one or two emoji long—presumably replies to something else. Less than one in a thousand messages were long enough that they might qualify as a potential emoji story.

In fact, the only people I’ve been able to find who regularly communicate with extended emoji sequences are preliterate children.

Emoji aren’t behaving like words in this respect: there are no repetitions at all in the top two hundred sequences of two, three, and four words in the Corpus of Contemporary American English.

What’s important about the beat is the rhythm: when you stutter out loud, your beat gestures stutter with you. When you hold a vowel for a loooong time, your beat gestures hold a silent scream for just as long.

One useful side effect of emoticons is that they let you incorporate the facial part into your running text, right alongside your words, rather than using a large, unwieldy image that has to go on a new line—even if it’s made out of the same ASCII characters as the rest of your message.

Just five years after emoji entered the international stage, in early 2015, the most popular emoji, tears of joy , surpassed the usage level of the most popular emoticon, :).