Lolcatese – Learn it or eat my dust

“Lolcateze: U Lernz it Or U Eatz Mai Dust Sucka” — en that The language of the future? What is it and where does it come from? You have just seen an example of what has been called lolcateco. Lolcatese had its origins in primitive bulletin board systems that predate the Internet. Named for the acronym LOL, “laughing out loud,” lolcatese is beginning to evolve into an independent language, complete with grammar and spelling conventions, and even pronunciation hints, even though lolcatese is primarily a written language. The grammar police do not take Lolcateco seriously as a language; such is the fate of pidgins, patois, and creoles in general. But they may have to, and with the internet, it may be sooner than any of us imagine!

Grammar students may notice that in Lolcateco:

• the items are gone
• the words “to” and “for” are replaced by digits,
• the case of the pronoun is usually dropped: “she” becomes “she”, for example
• deliberate misspellings, stemming from common typographical errors, such as “the” for “the” are de rigueur
• verb conjugation (as if English verbs weren’t simple enough already) is simplified,
• the verbs of being disappear and are simply implied and understood as in Russian or in ebony.
• spellings based on pronunciation without typos are common, such as “iz” for “is”

• Snowclone expressions predominate, based on the language of the players or other popular culture.

Lolcatese is easier to learn than English. It seems to be evolving as the Internet’s lingua franca for social communication. The young will bring it along with them as they age into the mainstream of society. It will infiltrate international trade, music and sports first, then gradually the rest of society(ies) will catch up. In just one more generation, young people will be born who write lolcatese before they do english. For these people, it will be their mother tongue as far as written languages ​​go, and they will enhance its expressive power as it graduates from written pidgin (natively written by no one) to written creole (a language derived from pidgin acquiring native writers over time). Will writing affect and influence your spoken language? That remains to be seen.

Prediction for the future: Their grandchildren may receive high school diplomas written in a recognized, formalized, and evolved version of Lolcateco.