Periodically, one goes through periods of deep metaphysical malaise. You look around at the world, wondering how such evil could flourish and such suffering could endure. You descend deeper into darkness, your faith in humanity waning, wondering why we were ever born into this cruel world. Then, suddenly, you realize that somebody has written a programming language based off of the dialect of Lolcats/Cat Macros, and your faith in humanity’s inherent good is completely restored.

LOLCode is a computer programming language concept which draws its vocabulary from the recent internet sensation of captioned cat pictures. Although not fully functional yet, it’s still linguistically fascinating on many different levels, and deserves mention.

i has dialect

One of the most interesting parts of this programming language is that it can exist at all, and the fact that it can goes a long way towards establishing the legitimacy of a feline dialect.

Imagine that I wanted to create a programming language based solely off of star wars vocabulary. I would likely start by finding a donor language, whose basic syntax and ideas I would borrow. Then, I would begin to slowly find equivalents and their translations.

Some equivalent/translation pairs might be obvious. ‘Death Star’ for a verb which meant “remove file”, maybe ‘carbonite’ for “pause process”. One could even get a bit more ornate and incorporate some movie quotes. Perhaps “there is an error” could be coded with ‘It’s a Trap!’, and “load this program” could be ‘Commence Primary Ignition’.

However, no matter how nerdy I felt at the time, my plan would be fatally flawed from the outset. Sooner or later, I would find an expression that was too niché (fulfilling just a small purpose) to have a Star Wars equivalent. I’d have to rely on a set canon of phrases to fill in the blanks, and there’s no way to work around it and still maintain the Star Wars theme.

The reason that LOLCode is so awesome is that, based on what I’ve seen so far, it doesn’t seem to have that limit. Based on my highly scientific research at icanhascheezburger.com, it would appear that LOLCat has become a full fledged dialect. There are many captioned images there, each slightly different, and each seems to fit a coherent grammatical pattern. Some linguists are starting to pick up on distinct patterns and grammatical rules, and based on the fact that any sentence can now be LOLCatted, I’m quite tempted to say that LOLCat has become a productive and functional dialect of English.

Because of this productivity of the LOLCat dialect, it would be quite possible for somebody to take any given sentence or idea and put into LOLCat, thus ensuring that LOLCode could, in theory, become fully functional without ever breaking character. This is very exciting, and very awesome.

mai translationz r not straitforwerd

LOLCode is a very special sort of translation. Conventionally, when one sits down to label a cat, the source is an English sentence (I’m yet to find any cats “en mi refrigeradora, comiendo mis comidaz”). However, here, what people are doing is finding equivalents in human/feline language for concepts, verbs, and ideas within a computer language.

Rather than being able to simply translate, they’re forced to create the inflexible, ambiguity free grammar required to tell a computer what to do. This is tough enough to do even using all sorts of abstract symbols, but to do it within LOLCat dialect and syntax is wonderfully difficult. They’re adapting a human language into a dialect, then bending it into a computer language. This is by no means an easy ask, and it’s a far more complex sort of translation than many.

For this alone, I salute the creator and contributors to LOLCode. Although it may seem silly to some, this is really some top-of-the-line linguistic work.

d00d. ur dialect is teh suxx0rs

Perhaps the even interesting than the mere fact that LOLCat has become a translatable dialect is the fact that, well, there are already people who are arguing about the “correct” way to say something in LOLCat. Take, for instance, this post on the LOLCode wiki:

I know VISIBLE is the current output command, but it’s so not LOLCAT. What if we used LOL as the output instead? So, the Count-1 example becomes:

(Code)

I think this works very well, is funny to read and matches actual LOLCAT protocol, sorta. I guess the LOL would be at the end normally.

As a linguist, this is really, really exciting. People are already trying to step in and enforce the “rules” of the LOLCat dialect. It seems like, as a “native speaker” of LOLCat, the author of this page had a distinct intuition about the “proper” means of expressing a concept in this dialect. Truly incredible.

Although this community of people has only arisen recently, I’m very excited at the potential for the later discussions of “proper” LOLCat, and the sociolinguistic goodness sure to arise from it.

o hai. i discussed ur werk.

So, author of (and contributors to) LOLCode: I salute you. This is a unique, wonderful, and groundbreaking project, and I really hope that it continues to yield such fascinating linguistic insight into the future.

Keep up the good work, and don’t let anybody convince you that what you’re building is silly or unnecessary. If there are two things that the world of technology needs, it’s probably humor and cute, fuzzy animals, and really, I can’t think of a better way to combine the two.

Alright, I’m done. kthxbye

Tagged with Computational Linguistics, Conventional Linguistics, Dialects and Idiolects, Language Humor, Language Usage, Language, Computers, and the Internet, Sociolinguistics, Translation and Translation Theory | 32 Comments


Disclaimer: I adore the Language Log. I truly, truly do. The authors deserve commendation for their work at pushing language and linguistic theory out into the world. Their site and work is one of the prime inspirations for my humble little blog, and damnit, I hope that I have as much capacity for outreach when and if I ever hit academia. Why the sudden bout of blatant Language Log worship? Well, the subject of this post is lifted straight from a recent post by Sally Thomason, and I’d feel bad leeching off their linguistic discoveries without at least a bit of sycophancy (translation: sucking up). I try to create new content as often as possible here, but when I do repost something or quote large parts o the works of others, I want to make sure that credit is given. Thus, Language Log, Language Log, Language Log. I feel much better now, thanks. On to the post…

This morning, as usual, I rolled out of bed to my computer and checked my RSS feeds. In doing so, this quote from a professor, taken from Sally Thomason’s latest post on the Language Log jumped out at me. Actually, that’s not true, it sprung into my heart, soothing my harrowed soul and putting as much of a smile as it could on my still-slumbering face. Here’s a bit of it:

…

I always emphasize that it’s not so much right and wrong, that people speak differently everywhere, but that there’s a certain amount of snobbery in knowing “standard usage” and adhering to it, like it’s a password that says, “I know the code, I have learned the secrets of this society of academics/lawyers/receptionists and can be trusted to behave appropriately.” I tell them they HAVE to learn it and know when to use it unless they want to shoot themselves in the foot on resumes and applications, but they don’t have to believe it’s God’s Preferred Way of Speaking English.

I’ve had more than one student come up to me after an ACT class and say, “You’re the first English teacher I’ve had who didn’t tell me my mother spoke like an uneducated hick,” or “This is the first time anyone’s explained why standard usage is important.”

It’s sad that pointless prescriptivism may keep these kids from top schools. But that’s why we absolutely HAVE to teach it to them, so they’re not fighting an uphill battle on the language front. They’re already at a disadvantage without the money, resources, and connections wealthy suburban Chicago students have in spades. It would be brutal not to teach them the “code” they need to pass the gatekeepers.

Laura Petelle (the author of this excerpt), you are, officially, my hero-of-the-day for February 9th, 2007. This all DESPERATELY needed to be said, and it sounds like you’re saying it, not just to Language Log, but the people for whom it counts.

Standard usage is just that, a standard of usage, but that term can be deceiving. Just because a language (or a dialect) is not the same as the accepted standard doesn’t mean it’s “sub-standard” or “uneducated”. Every dialect is grammatical, meaning that it conforms to its own specific grammar (and usually more frequently than the speech of those trying to use a “standard dialect”, and there are no “better” or “worse” dialects than any others. “Non-Standard” does not mean “sub-standard”, and I applaud Laura for teaching that.

Sadly, she’s right. Knowing the “whom”‘s of the standard dialect (of any language) can be seen as a showing of one’s social status, and a person who’s never been taught those sorts of things will be at a disadvantage due to a charming little set of social stigmas based on language use. So, as she says, we have to teach people the rules, but also let them know that it’s okay to ignore them at home. Just because I need to wear a tie to go to a wedding, doesn’t mean I should wear it at home while watching a movie. “Standard Usage” is a sociolinguistic tool, and although we need to know it, we don’t need to worship it.

So, Laura, if you’re out there reading this, you have my highest respects, and if you’re ever in the area, I’ll buy you a smoothie if you post your above comments outside the English department.

Don’t worry, though, they’re just across the courtyard from Linguistics. We’d have your back.

Tagged with Conventional Linguistics, Dialects and Idiolects, Sociolinguistics, Tirades | 1 Comment


I was Wikipedia surfing recently (drifting from page to page on Wikipedia), and I happened upon the page describing the idea of a “Shibboleth”. A Shibboleth, for those unfamiliar with the term, is a linguistic “dead giveaway” that can distinguish a member of one group from a person who isn’t. For an example, look at the term itself (explanation borrowed from Wikipedia’s Page on Shibboleth):

The term originates from the Hebrew word שבולת‎, which literally means “stream, torrent”.[2] It derives from a story in the Hebrew Bible, in which pronunciation of this word was used to distinguish members of a group (like the Ephraimites) whose dialect lacked an SH sound (as in shoe) from members of a group (like the Gileadites) whose dialect did include such a sound.

In the Book of Judges, chapter 12, after the inhabitants of Gilead inflicted a military defeat upon the tribe of Ephraim (around 1370–1070 BC), some Ephraimites crossed secretly into Gilead’s territory in an attempt to escape retribution. In order to identify and kill these disguised refugees, the Gileadites put each refugee to a simple test:

“And the Gileadites took the passages of Jordan before the Ephraimites: and it was so, that when those Ephraimites which were escaped said, Let me go over; that the men of Gilead said unto him, Art thou an Ephraimite? If he said, Nay;
Then said they unto him, Say now Shibboleth: and he said Sibboleth: for he could not frame to pronounce it right. Then they took him, and slew him at the passages of Jordan: and there fell at that time of the Ephraimites forty and two thousand.” (Judges 12:5-6, KJV)

I can understand using these sorts of things to get a better idea of who you’re dealing with (or even for some friendly dialect mockery), but to kill somebody based on their pronunciation seems a little bit overboard. Apparently, it’s not though. The wikipedia site has a whole listing of Shibboleths used in War, including some very interesting examples. Apparently, the phrase “War Weapons Week” (followed by “Welmouth”) was used by British forces to distinguish Germans, who generally have trouble with the English “W”, often turning it into a V sound (“var veapons veek”).

Now, I can understand things like this to be a nice, quick and easy way of removing some initial doubt about the origins of a person. However, I can’t imagine it working as the main system of identification. Take, for instance, the “War, Weapons, Week” example. Yes, the English W is an uncommon sound, and it’s rather unlikely that a German foot soldier with little English training would be able to produce it.

However, it’s very important to remember that the vocal apparatus of a German speaker is no different than that of an English speaker. Human vocal tracts don’t vary across ethnic and social groups. The only reason most Germans can’t pronounce a W is because they’ve not been raised or trained to do so. This is the same reason that English speakers have a heck of a time with the Spanish trilled (or “rolled”) R. The basic lesson to learn here is that given enough time, dedication and training, a speaker of any language can learn to produce pretty much any sound. In fact, one of the things that you’re often tested on in Phonetics courses is your ability to pronounce sounds not found in your native language. Anybody can learn any sound, if they truly care to, so a shibboleth based on pronunciation is only as strong as the dedication of the person you’re testing. It’s also worth noting that Bilingual or multilingual speakers (who have spoken or been exposed to several languages since birth) can have good (if not perfect) pronunciation of more than one language and dialect.

So, it’s quite possible to have a false-positive, somebody who can say the Shibboleth without trouble, yet is still from outside the desired group. Also, I suppose it’s perfectly possible to have a person who is in the desired group, but has some sort of speech impediment or linguistic background which would prevent them from making the proper pronunciation.

Although it’s an interesting concept, and a good first step to identifying somebody, it’s vital to remember that a pronunciation-based test will never be 100% accurate. If you’re cutting people down because they mispronounce a word, you might be killing friends based on the slip of a tongue, and enemy linguists can walk all over you. Ninjas have nothing on us. :)

Tagged with Conventional Linguistics, Dialects and Idiolects, Language Usage, Phonetics and Phonology, Sociolinguistics | Leave a Comment

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