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

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.

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. :)

Literary language is superior to the spoken language. Student’s studies are limited with target language’s fine arts and literature.

Now, you must realize that saying “language X is better than language Y” is a truly heinous offense to me, and every time somebody says something like it, an angel’s lexicon loses a word.

No languages are better, “more complete”, “less complex”, or otherwise elevated above any other languages. Hold on, I’ll say that again. No languages are better, “more complete”, “less complex”, or otherwise elevated above any other languages.

Seriously. For a language to be used by a native speaker, it literally MUST be complete, in such a way that anything which needs to be expressed, can be expressed through some means. Even in the case of a pidgin (a newly-formed language created from elements of two or more other languages), when the first group of children are raised speaking only that language, they will fill in any holes in the grammar and make the language so it’s able to express anything one would need to. When a person is raised speaking a language, dialect, or sociolect, you can nearly guarantee that they’re speaking a fully functional language/dialect/sociolect.

Now, that’s not to say that there aren’t differences between the languages, and that some languages might not be easier in some areas. For instance, Russian has a nice, simple writing system, which is nearly phonetic (every letter represents the same sound, every time), but it has a very complex system of marking aspect (completion of an action). Similarly, Nuuchahnulth (Nootka) has a very nice way of ordering words and particles (morphemes) in a sentence, but the sound system is, to this English speaker, incredibly difficult and complex. Similarly, a language of South America might have more efficient words for describing rain, whereas another language might be more adept at snow description. However, different doesn’t mean anything is necessarily any better or worse.

So, this brings me to my final point: When people say nasty things about a language or dialect, they’re really saying nasty things about the people who use it. Mind you, I’m not talking about “language X has a complex sound system”, I’m talking about “language X is inferior to language Y”. No linguist worth his or her salt will ever tell you that a given language or dialect is “better” or “worse” than any other. That’s a social judgment, and it has nothing to do with the actual language or dialect. It really only shows the feelings of the speaker about the language’s users, and generally, it’s pseudo-intellectual snobbery.

Remember, any time you hear somebody disrespecting a language or dialect, it’s one of two things. Either the person talking really doesn’t know what they’re talking about, or they’re knocking the language because they’re not willing to knock the people who speak it. Sometimes it’s both. Either way, at that point, it’s best to drop the Linguistics knowledge, put away the reference grammar, and grab yourself a raincoat, because although it might sound like actual intellectual discussion, they’re really just throwing mud on the playground.

E-Dentity Theft

First, let’s introduce some terms, this time, from [[Cryptography]]. In cryptography examples, they frequently use a short list of recurring characters. Alice and Bob are two people trying to communicate a secret message with one another. Alice wants the message to get to Bob and only Bob. Eve is a third party, trying to break into their communications and read that message (A truly great cartoon involving Eve). So, for our examples here, Bob will be trying to get in touch with Alice, and Eve will be trying to get information from them.

Every messenger service has some safeguards (usually passwords) to try and make sure that unauthorized people don’t get on your account. This will keep Eve from signing on at her home computer and pretending to be Alice. However, once Eve has physical access to Alice’s machine, this breaks down. If Alice runs down the hall to use the restroom, closing her existing conversation, Eve can sit down and start a conversation with Bob. At this point, Bob is completely vulnerable, as he still thinks he’s talking to Alice, and will share information as such. There might be a warning sign, though.

E-Diolect

Some while back, I discussed the idea of Idiolect, or the patterns of usage, meaning, and sound that are specific not just to a group, but to a single individual. In spoken language, this might be expressed by specific turns of phrase (for instance, I’ll say “w00t” in conversation) and sound changes (I usually put a slight hint of “L” in the words “walk” and “talk”).

However, people tend to have an online idiolect (I prefer E-Diolect) as well. In email, some people tend to include a full “Hello Alice” at the start of every email, and end with a “Love, Bob”. Others will just type out the message with no formalities at all. Similarly, when quoting a message, some will split the quote with their responses, and others will just respond at the top, and leave the quote at the bottom.

Over Instant Messager services, the E-Diolect really shows up nicely, and tends to express itself in many different ways:

1. Emoticons (“Smilies”): Does the person use them at all? If so, which ones? It’s rare that people will use all the different ones available, and most people stick to a comparatively small set. That set can be used to identify them. Also, do they make the smilies using an “=” or a “:” ["=)" or ":)"]?
2. Capitalization: I capitalize pretty obsessively in IM, whereas other people will never hit the shift key. Some are a mix, capitalizing “I” and some names, but never the first letter of a new thought/sentence. aLsO, sOmE pEoPlE are prone to varying their capitalization.
3. Contractions: sum ppl r rly obsessd wit makin cntractns on im. wut bout ur friendz? (Some people will use only specific ones (like “brb” (be right back) or “ppl” (people).
4. 1337-5p34k: Pronounced “Leet Speak”, a sociolect in which people replace certain l3tt3r5 with numb3r5, among other changes. (Check out the 1337 translator)
5. Line break habits: Some people put line breaks/between every/other word, just/hitting return as/they go/writing in a/stream of/consciousness. Others prefer long messages.
6. Correction: When somebody sends a typo in IM, do they correct it? If so, how? Do they just retype the word? Do they usually put a *star in front of it?
7. Actions: When expressing taking an action via IM, some people will *put it in stars*, others use IRC markup (/me writes a post), and some even ~*~get creative~*~.
8. Punctuation: Few people use periods (.) in IM, but question marks and commas aren’t uncommon, everybody has their habits.

Applied E-Diolect Studies

So, Eve is on Alice’s computer. Bob gets a message:

cryptogeekalice: hey bob, wut did u get eve 4 xmas

cryptogeekalice: i want 2 know so i dun g3t her teh same thing ;P

If Bob paid attention, he’d quickly notice that Alice capitalizes, hates contractions, never uses any smilies but :) and :D, and uses Question marks. He’d smell a rat, and likely withhold any information about Santa-related activities.

However, it’s not always that easy. Eve might know Alice’s style too, and try and make some adaptations. However, it takes a lot of observation and skill to mimic somebody online in all of the above factors, while still maintaining a natural, conversationally believable tone. Finally, Eve will have to mimic Alice’s communicative style, making sure not to use her own catchphrases, conversational norms, and other such things.

The last words

Bob and Alice are never really safe. With enough research, observation, and planning, Eve will be able to imitate either of them, and it would be very difficult to detect without a webcam or some biometric device. However, a little observation and awareness of E-Diolect goes a long way towards discouraging Eve and people like her from engaging in a little bit of E-Dentity Theft.

What did the above statement mean to you? Some people might see it as a sort of confession, my confessing to an act that you might not have been aware of, but without much in the way of context. However, for the readers versed in American history and mythology, that statement likely evoked the words of George Washington, declaring to his father that he chopped down a cherry tree and being a shining pillar of honesty in the process. So, perhaps the question for them was twofold: Why is he talking about this, and why is he pretending to be George Washington?

Well, not to disappoint, but I’ve never cut down a cherry tree, and, considering that the statement was false, I apparently can tell a lie. However, I can prove a point with it as well. For those who were familiar with George Washington’s quotation, that statement had an entirely different meaning than for those of you who missed the reference. At least a part of the meaning in that statement was dependent on your knowing something about the background behind my word choice.

Now, imagine you walk up to a coworker, relieved at the successful conclusion of a long, drawn out project. Smiling, you enthusiastically proclaim “It’s over!!” He stares at you for a second, and promptly breaks into tears and runs off to the men’s room. You just stand, mortified, unsure what you said or did to get such a reaction, until later, he comes back, still teary eyed, and explains that only a week ago, his now ex-wife had used those same words as she presented him with unexpected divorce papers, and that your using the unintentionally called back on that. He explains that he too is happy that the project is over, and apologizes for the breakdown.

There’s really nobody at fault here, this was just an unfortunate usage of a phrase which had a different meaning to each party in the communication. This is also a very extreme example, but still, it emphasizes the fact that meaning and connotation of words can be very individual, even on top of the widely agreed “definition” among speakers.

When you walk up to a person on the street and mention the term “dog”, their interpretation will be very different depending on their life experiences. Whereas one person with a phobia might get apprehensive, a veterinarian might smile or show concern, another person might think of Sparky, their childhood pet, and a dog breeder might start picturing a specific breed or characteristic. It’s unlikely that somebody would think of one characteristic or image to the point where they wouldn’t get the reference to a generic domesticated canine, but it’s also very unlikely that a person would only see a generic, faceless, breedless dog with no connotation.

I’m sure there are some voices in semantic theory that would disagree (and they’re welcome to comment or email me to let me post their opinion), but often, the “meaning” of a word for every individual person is the sum of their past experiences with that word and what it might have symbolized. If a child got bitten by a dog, the word “dog” might have a terrible connotation the week after, but if they were to go on to work at an animal hospital, that connotation might be replaced or altered.

One could pretend that all words have a nice, easy, abstract meaning, found in the dictionary and independent of the people using it. However, in practice, every word has both a general meaning, shared by most speakers of the language, and then a more individual shade of meaning, unique to their experiences. Knowing the context, both in which you’ll use a word, and in which the listener will hear it, is vital to understanding what to say, when.

This is easier said than done, of course, because you can very seldom get in the head of your listener to know just what a given word means to them. However, it’s always worth keeping in mind, because once you do, saying “I am glad for the successful completion of our newest project” to your newly divorced co-worker doesn’t sound nearly as awkward, does it?