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Capella
Dark Cat of the Sith
 
Join Date: Jun 2007
Location: Rochester, NY
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2011-05-29, 05:46

It's intentional. Ever seen lolcat pics? It's the type of grammar used therein. Or at least it's an intentional use of subgroup dialectical when I do it. I don't know if the people you're seeing doing it are doing it intentionally because they've seen the funny talk on the internet, or if it's just that this kind of net grammar (and also texting spelling/grammar) are moving out of their subgroup-marker status and into the broader realm of general consciousness or not. If it's the latter, it could be interesting to follow and see if eventually we develop two very distinct English groups, standard/formal language for certain environments only, and this more abbreviated variant for general usage.

For a class on linguistic anthropology a few years back, I did a paper on the evolution of lolcat-style grammar from a set of memes used by a tiny subgrouping of a subgroup to something robust enough to serve as an actual dialect, and I discussed the cultural relevance of people using it (basically, it serves as a way of proving one is part of the ingroup). It was actually a really good topic to choose, as with a lot of linganth you can look at language's influence on culture but you're usually looking at really long timespans. Internet memetic jargon moves so fast that it went from an obscure thing to an actual dialect with lexicon in a few short years.

"A blind, deaf, comatose, lobotomy patient could feel my anger!" - Darth Baras
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