I’ve always been a linguistic chameleon.
By which I do not mean that I am good at languages. After four years of mangling my rolled-r’s in Spanish class, I admitted defeat. However, I am fluent in many English-dialects, and I pick up slang like a bad habit. If I visit Texas, I come back with a drawl. If I watch too much Harry Potter, I start sounding British.
Brilliant!
It all started as a young girl, when I had to camouflage my embarassingly large vocabulary – acquired from crazy amounts of reading – in order to fit into the Southern California scene. I can like totally rock a Valley Girl accent.
It took years of engineering school to start to undo that tragedy, but Val Gal and tech speak is a strange hybrid. My friends joked that my vocabulary got bigger the more beers I had. That was because the verbal filter was loosened and the natural base language – wordnerd – came out. By the time I reached graduate school, I realized that suppressing my inner nerd wasn’t in my best interest. In the wilds of academia, you were expected to talk like that.
It was a liberating experience.
I was reminded of all this by my recent post on FB:
Dude! Like, what’s the latest lingo in Southern California? I want to totally nail it for this character I’m writing, but, like, it’s been a long time, yanno? Bring it, Facebook Friends! K? Sweet.
My California friends came out and helpfully suggested terms like random and awkward, but then words like fail started showing up and my non-California friends chimed in that fail was spoken there too, and suddenly it was Happy Llama, Sad Llama all over again.
Internet slang was everywhere.
It made me pause. What if all those quaint regional dialects were being overwritten by a universal slang? There are no geographic boundaries to language anymore, and anyone (English-speaking at least) could be affected. Was the world-leveling of the internet seeping into our language, destroying the eccentricities that make humanity, well, cool?
ZOMG!
I think it’s less dire than that, and the Internet is just one of many influences. Regional real-life (RL!) speech patterns will probably still drive local slang for a long time.
That is, until we all get the brain implants. Then it’s game-over, people.
Do you speak interwebs in RL?
No, and if I go to I realize that most of the people I talk to would have no clue what I was saying or would look at me really funny!
@Laura You must have normal friends! 🙂 #peopleexpectmetobeweird
Well, I don't say LOL, but some other terms were around even before the internet. 😉 I love that we can feel at home all over the world because of some of the shared language.
I think that more than words, there is a flow to regional speak. The best reads are where you barely realize there's regional flavor, because it's so naturally spoken by the characters.
Nope. At least I don't think I do.
You're lucky, Susan. I'm not a linguistic chameleon. I end up absorbing dialects and come up with my own accent and manner of speech. No wonder no one can figure out where I'm from (though I get New Zealand a lot, even though I've never been there). 😉
This post delighted me. I was fortunate enough to surround myself with friends who also spoke nerd for most of my formative years–at least my brand of nerd–not necessarily "rocket scientist nerd."
But I totally get what you're saying about the interwebs being the great equalizer. But really the memes have a language all their own. If you use lolspeak around people who don't spend much time in those particular intertubes, then they have no idea what you're talking about.
I do sometimes speak interwebs in RL, and writer speak, and southern American, and nerd. My speech is an amalgam of all the influences in my life, and I think you're right.
It will always be that way.
@Tricia I love that language is flexible, and you are absolutely right – I can say "You have got to be kidding," in So Cal and Brit speak and have it sound completely different. You really have to master the local speak to get the cadence right in print.
@Stina I couldn't tell where your accent was from, either (when I first met you!). #wouldnothaveguessedNewZealandthough
@Erynn Amalgam = awesome word of the day. #canyouspeakinhashtags? #becauseIthinkIdo
Love all your Val Gal, Tech Speak and Word Nerd terms! And I can pick up a southern accent/Brit accent too if I have too much exposure (and fail miserably at foreign languages) But I think you may be onto something here with text-speak and internet-speak growing in leaps and bounds.
Hell, I have trouble speaking interwebs on the interwebs.
I mean, whenever a post has "1 comments" at the bottom it absolutely drives me crazy. GRAMMARFAIL.
@Margo It's a funny crazy world, isn't it? 🙂
@Bryan LOL! You manage well enough, sir. 🙂
I'm terrible with slang, and I don't even attempt 'interwebs' past the occasional LOL (pretty sure it means Laugh Out Loud, but I've seen it also mean Lots Of Love). LOL/LOL!
@JB Ha! I read someone say it means Lots of Laughs (which made my Laugh Out Loud)…which just shows that any good slang means exactly whatever the person wants it to. LOL ("Linguists Only Laugh")
Just wonder if once we get the brain implants I can just go to sleep and let the microchip take over.
I don't speak web or sms and cringe when I see my daughter's badly written facebook posts and the replies.
Wagging Tales – Blog for Writers
I pick up accents too. Once when we drove through Tennessee I ran into a gas station to get a pack of gum while Hubby filled up the tank. I came out with a hard southern drawl that lasted for weeks. I hope the internet doesn't kill all the fun dialects, slang, and such. What would I do for fun in a gas station then?
I'm definitely a linguistic chameleon too. (And I love that term!)
As for the slang, here's what my kids keep saying that totally annoys me: instead of "that's creepy" they say "that's creeper." As someone who enjoyed diagramming sentences and debating proper usage of words like myriad, hearing "that's creeper" makes me crazy!!
@Charmaine Yup, I think the chip will take care of everything. 🙂
@Leisha LOL I think we better keep the accents, just to keep you out of trouble. 🙂
@Sherrie Ew, creeper does sound nastier. And grammatically unpleasing as well. 🙂 Thanks for sharing!
I have that problem too – I have to watch myself to not pick up speech patterns from others. I'm a stickler for old dialects and was saddened when I first heard how much radio eradicated a lot of regional British dialects when BBC-speak became the standard.
I think I could do without Valley Girl speak [g] We had a variant of it here. Like, you know, whatever.
@Deniz Wow, there used to be MORE British dialects. #Igetconfusedasitis
hi miss susan! thats a pretty interesting and fun post. my brother sebastians a linguist lizard too. ha ha. he knows lots bout languages and what their made up of. none of us talk interweb at our house just only on the internet. sometimes for fun we talk jamaican patois and people say huh? yah mon! ha ha.
…hugs from lenny
@Lenny linguist lizard Ha! And I went to Jamaica for my honeymoon, man, and was speaking the patios for weeks!
I LOVED this post. I'm a fellow So. Cal. born and bred where dumbing down vocabulary to speak surf lingo was a high school requirement. I use the kids in my class and Lisa Gail Green as my living online lingo dictionaries.
@Leslie *waves* I knew a fellow Californian would understand! How cool to have the kids as a ready resource! 🙂
I love accents and yes, I understand what you are saying. When I was in high school I had to room with three girls from Louisiana when I went to a photography camp for a week and came home with a thick southern accent.
I loved the valley girl era too.
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