Internet Book Club: 'Because Internet'
How the internet is changing the English language
Previously in Internet Book Club:
Why do some folks type LOL rather than lol? How did emojis develop out of emoticons? How does the grammar of lolcat and doggo memes make them more likely to spread?
These are the questions Gretchen McCulloch explores in her book Because Internet. The central thesis of the book is that language is significant, that the internet has changed the way we use language, and that if you study internet lingo carefully you can learn important things about how and why we communicate in the digital age. If you’re a nerd for linguistics and you spend too much time online, it’s the book for you.
How the Internet Impacts Language
McCulloch is a professional linguist, and spends the first few chapters of the book geeking out over how easy the internet makes the study of linguistics. It used to be fairly difficult to do things like
Gather a large corpus of natural, every day speech from regular people (as opposed to formal writing)
Survey the differences between how people in different locations spoke
Analyze how dialects changed over time - who starts using a new phrase or pronunciation first? How does it spread and eventually get assimilated into the mainstream?
These tasks are now incredibly easy to study via technology. We can track who started using the slang ‘af’ for the phrase ‘as fuck’1. All you have to do is some basic analysis of Twitter’s history. ‘af’ pops up first among Latinos in Los Angeles and Miami around 2010, then spreads to African American users in 2011-12, before it finally starts appearing in BuzzFeed headlines around 2014-15 - a sure sign of mainstream adoption.
The internet also reinforces results than linguists have known for a long time. Much of the most cutting-edge slang or the most dramatic shifts in the English language comes from groups like young people, African Americans, the working class, or women.2 Swearing peaks in adolescence and young adulthood and declines thereafter. People are more likely to adopt a linguistic change the close they are socially to its origin. These aren’t new results, but they’ve been replicated by online communities over and over.
But the internet isn’t just a tool for making linguistics research easier. It’s actually accelerating the pace at which language changes. Modern social media has several radical effects on language. It takes linguistic groups that would have previously been well-isolated and thus less likely to change and puts them in direct proximity with everyone else. It increases the speed at which we can interact. It’s the equivalent of throwing the entirety of the English-speaking world into a blender and pressing the TURBO LIQUIFY button. English is even beginning to infect languages around the world due to its prominence on the internet. Most young people around the world - and especially if they spend a lot of time online - will have a bunch of English language phrases in their non-English everyday speech. My favorite example of this is a video of a Danish father telling his sons he’s won the lottery, to which they respond in perfect American accents: Oh my God! Oh my God!
Languages worldwide are becoming more decentralized, they’re getting infected by English slang, and they’re changing faster than they ever have before. But more than just changing how we speak, writing on the internet has quickly become its own unique dialect. And ‘Internet English’ is as distinct as interesting as any other dialect.
Generations of Internet English
Imagine sending a message to a friend: “omg class is so boooooring i wanna kms”. This is a distinct form of the English language fully separate from any regional dialect. It involves the frequent use of acronyms like omg or kms3. It has an exaggerated version of the word boring to emphasize the feeling. It has unusual patterns of capitalization and punctuation. Your friend might respond with a series of emojis. In every sense of the word that matters, this kind of online speak is its own dialect.
In fact, it’s not sufficient to say that’s it’s a single dialect. There are many different versions of internet English, and McCulloch believes that the most important distinction isn’t race, gender or location - it’s your internet age. When you joined the social internet determines how you speak online. McCulloch separates internet users into four distinct generations based on their first ever social networks:
Usenet, BBS, listserve or the early forum internet
AIM, MSN Messenger, blogs, LiveJournals, Xanga
Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Gchat, etc
Instagram, Snapchat, WhatsApp, iMessage4
The first generation is what McCulloch calls ‘Old Internet People’. To plug another recent addition to the Internet Book Club, they’re the kind of people you’d read about in The Modem World. They were online when it was unusual to be so, when it required some degree of effort or technical skill to actually interact with people over the web. Some old internet slang from that era still exists - BTW and FYI were invented around 1977, and words like ‘feature’, ‘bug’ and ‘glitch’ were new slang that eventually became mainstream. The oldest generation invented a lot of things we take for granted now - the idea that ALL CAPS MEANS YOU ARE SHOUTING, many common abbreviations like LOL and BRB5, and the first uses of emoticons like :-) or :/ to indicate mood. Old internet folks tended to be geeks with a high degree of technical knowledge, and much of their slang related to technical subjects relating to hardware, code, or online systems.
The next generation, by contrast, was far less technical. They didn’t have to be savants to get online and they were less concerned with technical subject matter. In the late 1990s and early 2000s there was such a large wave of new users joining the internet that McCulloch separates them into two groups: Full Internet People and Semi Internet People. Full Internet People were those who eagerly embraced life online, using it as a medium to conduct their social lives. They sought out chat rooms, made friends through blogs, and were online almost every day. Semi Internet People weren’t interested in all that. They probably used email for work, and maybe visited a couple websites a month to accomplish specific tasks, but weren’t living their lives online. What’s fascinating about these two distinct groups is that they developed very different versions of online English that you can likely recognize as different dialects.
Your mom, a Semi Internet Person who was never a very online person except to email family members and search for recipes is far more likely to use ‘LOL’. You, a Full Internet Person who grew up in online communities, is more likely to use ‘lol’. We can all recognize this - we know that today we’re more likely to see a fully capitalized LOL in a Facebook post from grandma than in a WhatsApp group chat with friends. How and when you first got online exerts a heavy influence on how you write.
The last generations can also be separated into two groups: Pre Internet and Post Internet people. The folks whose first experience with social media was Facebook or later tend to be one of two types: significantly older people who were very late adopters of anything online, or kids too young to have ever used earlier platforms. Pre Internet elders have a distinctive way of typing - McCulloch gives this example:
“i just beat 2 french guys at bridge…..&..they were GOOD…glad i havent lost my chops,,, hope you all are doing well…”
If you’re like me, this kind of sentence positively screams old folks, a Pre Internet Person without much native knowledge of online communities. And that’s not an accident - it turns out that physical writing on postcards, recipe books, and personal notes in the 1950s and 60s is filled with that same kind of ellipses heavy, multiple comma and multiple dash style. They’re imitating the kind of informal writing they grew up with.
Post Internet People are the youngest generation, people who grew up when Facebook was already for their uncool parents and who can’t remember a time when their entire community wasn’t already online. And they have distinct forms of internet-speak as well. Their grandma might say LOL in all caps, and their mom might say lol in lower case. But both those adults likely mean lol in the actual sense of ‘laughing out loud’, to indicate they found something very funny. A Gen Z Post Internet person is more likely to use lol as a mood indicator:
feeling sick this am lol
my mom is so mad that I didn’t finish my project lol
you look great in red lol
They’re not literally laughing out loud. They’re using lol as a sort of wry grin, an expression of sympathy, light sarcasm, or flirting. It’s used to indicate there’s a potential second meaning to the sentence before it (and it’s almost always at the end, not the middle or beginning of a message. And usually unpunctuated).
A Million Linguistic Puzzles
This is what Because Internet delights in. It shows you the different ways that we express ourselves online, how the internet influences our communication styles, how that works differently for different groups of people, and more. Once you realize how diverse and interesting language on the internet can be, there’s an almost endless list of topics you can explore.
Why does ending a text with a single period seem like proper punctuation to some, but passive aggressive others? Why do we use exclamation points the way we do? Why does “Hey… can you call me…?” come off as casual to some folks while others read it as urgent? Why do we emphasize in the style of omggggggg instead of ommmmmmg? Are there subtle differences between emoticons such as =D and emoji such as😁? What’s indicated when people use 1337 5P34K, or mIxEd cAPiTaLiZaTiOn, or ǧ̶̬̲͕̅l̵͔̲̏̾̈́̓ḯ̶̢̢̡̝̽t̵̠̀̕c̵̹͙̋̊̚h̸͉̮͔̿̐̓ ̵͎̀́̔̔t̷̡̗̬͐̄̅ẽ̵̘̑̽x̷͕̘̃̃t̵͙̬́̎̾? How did we start (and then stop) using tildes to indicate sarcasm as though that was ~so cool~?
If you’re interested in these kinds of question, McCulloch has written the book for you. The book has deep dives on typographical tone of voice, meme culture, emoji usage, and more. It also examines the generational differences in how different groups of internet users interact with those typographies, memes, emojis, etc. It looks at how online writing has changed over the years, and is likely to continue to change.
I loved this book. I’m fascinated by the field of linguistics and have always enjoyed reading about it. I’m also incredibly online, so I was predisposed to enjoy Because Internet. But the book exceeded my expectations anyways. It contains a great amount of new information that I was delighted to learn, and it’s also an enjoyable read. Unlike some academic books, the prose flies by and is a delight to read. I highly, highly recommend it. McCulloch also has an excellent podcast Lingthusiasm if you just can’t get enough linguistics content.
As in, “This newsletter is cool af”
One linguist estimates that 90% of all linguistic change starts from women
“oh my god” and “kill myself”
Because Internet came out in 2019, and the research was from 2017 - so I’d imagine a current version would take into account a TikTok generation
There are also a shocking number of dead abbreviations that nobody outside of old internet users would recognize - HHOJ as ‘haha only joking’, BCNU as ‘be seeing you’, etc.