Both Wenker’s and Gilliéron’s dialect maps are meticulous, fascinating,5 and complicated, but if you know how to read them, you can trace the line between the villages in the north where French people around 1900 called Wednesday mercredi and those in the south where they called it dimècres.fn1 Or you can read Wenker’s hand-drawn map of Germany showing which regions pronounced “old”6 as alt, al, or oll. (Location 458)
As technology advanced, so did dialectology. In the 1960s, the Dictionary of American Regional English sent out fieldworkers in “Word Wagons”8 (green Dodge vans outfitted with a fold-out bed, an icebox, and a gas stovetop) to record locals in over a thousand communities on briefcase-sized reel-to-reel tape recorders. (Location 471)
As a simple proof of concept, let’s look at the work of the linguist Jacob Eisenstein, who found that geo-tagged tweets containing “hella” (as in “That movie was hella long”) are most likely to occur in Northern California, while those containing “yinz” (as in “I’ll see yinz later”) are clustered around Pittsburgh. (Location 533)
and the West Coast liked the Britishy “bollocks” and “bloody.” (Location 555)
For example, the abbreviation “af”33 for “as fuck” (as in “word maps are cool af”) starts out at low levels in Los Angeles and Miami in 2009, then spreads elsewhere in California, the South, and around Chicago in 2011–2012, suggesting that it was spreading from Hispanic to African American populations. The study stops there, but we can continue: in 2014 and 2015, “af”34 started appearing in BuzzFeed headlines, a decent measure of when it came to be co-opted by mainstream brands capitalizing on its association with African American coolness. (Location 659)
business-people adopting new corporate buzzwords. (Location 678)
Research in other centuries,39 languages, and regions continues to find that women lead linguistic change, in dozens of specific changes in specific cities and regions. Young women are also consistently on the bleeding edge of those linguistic changes that periodically sweep through media trend sections,40 from uptalk (the distinctive rising intonation at the end of sentences?) to the use of “like” to introduce a quotation (“And then I was like, ‘Innovation’”). The role that young women play as language disruptors is so clearly established at this point it’s practically boring to linguists who study this topic: well-known sociolinguist William Labov estimated that women lead 90 percent of linguistic change in a paper he wrote in 1990.41 (Location 702)
Men tend to follow a generation later: in other words, women tend to learn language from their peers; men learn it from their mothers. (Location 711)
Note: Woah
What’s less clear is why. Lots of reasons have been proposed,42 from the fact that women still dominate the caregiving of children in the societies studied, that women may pay more attention to language to compensate for relative lack of economic power or to facilitate social mobility, and that women tend to have more social ties. But in many cases, gender (like age) seems to be a proxy for other factors related to how we socialize with each other. (Location 712)
Milroy and Milroy figured that, just as your weak ties are a greater source of new information like gossip and employment opportunities than your close friends who already know the same things you do, more weak ties also lead to more linguistic change. (Location 746)
English has changed a lot: although we can manage Shakespeare, from only four centuries ago, with the help of footnotes, even The Canterbury Tales (six centuries ago) requires a full translation or a course in Middle English to understand. 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. Clearly, English has changed faster than Icelandic has over the same timespan. Milroy and Milroy proposed that the reason is weak ties. (Location 752)
The researchers concluded that both strong and weak ties have an important role to play in linguistic change: the weak ties introduce the new forms in the first place, while the strong ties spread them once they’re introduced. The internet, then, makes language change faster because it leads to more weak ties: you can remain aware of people who you don’t see anymore, and you can get to know people who you never would have met otherwise. (Location 782)
Most Arabic speakers know two varieties of Arabic: Modern Standard Arabic, which is the standardized, multinational version based on Classical Arabic that people learn to write in school but speak only rarely, and a local dialect, such as Egyptian or Moroccan Arabic, which is the language of everyday speech and doesn’t have an official written form. (Location 988)
Since # and @ are distinct symbols, it’s easy enough to automatically sort a giant pile of tweets, discarding the ones that contain both or neither. Sure, it’s a bit rough—people probably aren’t searching through sarcastic hashtags likesorrynotsorry for topical information, and Beyoncé probably won’t tweet you back (uh,sorry)—but it works pretty well at a large scale. What Eisenstein and Pavalanathan found was that people used regionalisms like “hella,” slang like “nah” and “cuz,” emoticons like :), and other informal language more in the tweets that @mentioned another user, while the same people used a more standardized, formal style in their tweets with hashtags. They theorized that, just as in person we’d generally talk more formally when addressing a roomful of people than when talking one-on-one, we’re directing a tweet with a hashtag towards a large group of people. Our @mentions,73 on the other hand, are more informal, only noticed by a select few—and we adjust our language electronically the same way we do out loud. (Location 1044)
From an internet linguistics perspective, language variation on-line is important not so much because it’s new (language has always varied), but because it’s only rarely been written down. Literature favors a few elite languages and dialects,76 even though there are around seven thousand languages in the world and at least half of the world’s population speaks more than one language. So this glorious variety masks a digital divide: (Location 1064)
Note: Compare imagined counitirs
But it’s important to be cautious about any attempt at Divination By Teenager. (Location 1735)
people say “got a lot of homework lol” or “you look good in red lol” but they don’t say “i love you lol” or “good morning lol.” (Location 1796)
In other words, people who were more fluent at typing used their increased facility to be more polite, just as polite as they would have been while talking. (Location 2048)
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), but writing them as acronyms rather than in full is also in-group vocabulary, saying, in effect, “We’re all internet people here. I trust you to get this.” (Location 2062)
Tumblr is understudied compared to Twitter (or rather, Twitter is overstudied compared to every other social network) because Twitter makes it very easy for researchers to collect a large, random assortment of tweets and search through them by date posted. (Location 2394)
Like how sparkle sarcasm can be derived from sparkle enthusiasm by a calculation, the aesthetic and ironic effects of minimalist typography are derived from knowledge of its earlier connotations (laziness, antiauthoritarianism) and the explicit choice to embrace them in an age of autocapitalization. Glitchy, pixelated, and badly photoshopped internet art came back into popularity in an age of high-definition cameras and smooth Instagram filters, and so did the written equivalent: stylized verbal incoherence mirroring emotional incoherence. (Location 2434)
Later, I got to thinking about it. I realized that I’d replied from my phone, but I’d had to go to extra effort in order to do so. If I hadn’t been able to override my phone’s default formatting—if I’d had to type “My brand is strong.” rather than “my Brand is Strong”—my irony could have been read as sincere arrogance. (Location 2443)
Note: When does this language come to define “very online”?
With minimalist lowercase at the beginning, I make myself approachable: like a self-deprecating joke at the beginning of a public speech, I remove myself from the position of being able to lecture others about their writing style by preemptively adopting features that someone else might lecture me for. (Location 2449)
But at a deeper level, what I was taking seriously was aligning myself with the internet fluent, demonstrating such fluency myself, and signaling that I understood how vital it is to be able to convey a typographical tone of voice. (Location 2457)
That commenter and I are not alone: people now communicate in this ironic dance every minute of every day. We succeeded, in fact, precisely because we’re not alone, because we’re not solitary intellectuals writing up abstract proposals for ironic punctuation, but social people trying our damnedest, paying attention to how our messages will be read, extending the grace of assuming that the other is also choosing their typography with intent. We succeeded because our linguistic norms were both oriented towards the social internet rather than the prescriptive red pen. (Location 2460)
and the fistbump came from the “dap”17 among black soldiers during the Vietnam War. (Location 2697)
One early manual suggested beginning with “a firm and cheery ‘hulloa’” or “What is wanted?” (Location 3260)
The idea of a third place is often invoked to explain the appeal of Starbucks: the first place is home,43 the second place is work, but people also need a third place to socialize that’s neither home nor work, like a coffeeshop. What Ray Oldenburg,44 the sociologist who coined the term in a 1989 book called The Great Good Place, (Location 3558)
Note: Pub but less clearly part of the work, wives, managers refuge. Nihilistic relroduction of labour
With many social media posts, the opposite is true—they’re not restricted by location, so people do want to make the message only comprehensible to insiders. Privacy through obscurity is a versatile tool for many social situations. A study of Estonian teens observed the teens doing things like posting song lyrics,68 quotes, or in-jokes that only made sense to their crush, in the hope that they’d see it and want to respond—which several teens said had worked. A study of queer youth on Facebook found that one way of navigating how out to be on a platform that contained both family members and potential members of a fellow queer community was to post queer pop culture references that would be easily interpretable by peers and go over the heads of their non-intended audience.69 Technologist danah boyd observed coded messages in more negative contexts, (Location 3741)
Note: Codes. Dewitt
When the previous comments were thoughtful and considerate, the new comment again followed suit—and it didn’t matter whether such comments were anonymous or linked to real-name Facebook accounts. (Location 3786)
Note: Bots
Videochat may be switching in the opposite direction: becoming more like a third place hangout with the rise of video “chilling” apps like Houseparty, (Location 3797)
But relatively soon, there will no longer be any people left who aren’t internet people, at least not at a generational level, not in major world languages. The internet will be like prior technologies that no one could escape: the radio or the telephone or the book. An individual person can still refuse to use social media or have a smartphone, just like a person in the 1980s could refuse to own a television set or have a phone line, but you’ll still know a lot about it regardless. The internet has become ambient, an inescapable part of the broader culture. (Location 4314)
Cockney has been replaced: Jenny Cheshire, Paul Kerswill, Sue Fox, and Eivind Torgersen. 2011. “Contact, the Feature Pool and the Speech Community: The Emergence of Multicultural London English.” Journal of Sociolinguistics 15(2). pp. 151–196. (Location 4668)
stylized arrow shape: Robert J. Finkel. April 1, 2015. “History of the Arrow.” American Printing History Association. printinghistory.org/arrow/. Robert J. Finkel. 2011. “Up Down Left Right.” Master’s thesis, University of Florida. (Location 5248)
