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Lolcats are one of those sudden Internet trends with no obvious explanation. In The Globe's Toronto and online editions last week, Ivor Tossell speculated as to the sudden popularity of cute-talking cats on the Internet. He suggested there was something satirical or subversive about these images and their language - a joke at the expense of Internet gibberish. What interests me most about lolcats is the discussion that they have unleashed among linguists, who find their dialect fascinating.

In case you missed Tossell's article, a lolcat is a photograph of a cat doing something cute. Overlaid on the image is some text. The text represents what the cat is saying - but it is written like a teenager's cellphone text message. So it has all kinds of abbreviations and tics, such as the use of "z" on the end of words. The name comes from "laughing out loud." The cats say things like "I can has cheezburger?" and "haf u seen our mitenz?!?!" If something bad has happened to one of them, the caption says "pwned!," which means "owned" in leetspeak, the cipher-like writing of computer hackers. (And "owned" means defeated or humiliated.)

Of course, not all lolcats are cats - any animal thus represented is a lolcat. There are also lolpresidents - images of U.S. presidents saying silly things. (John Adams, for example, says "iz in ur coloneez pwning ur redc00tes" - "I am in your colonies, defeating your redcoats.") The pictures are commonly used as signatures after posts on Internet forums, or at the end of e-mail messages.

A cartoon is going around that shows two stickmen talking. "What are you doing?" says one. "I'm here from the Internet," says the other, "gluing captions to your cats." You can add you own captions to various cat pictures at lolcatgenerator.com.

Lolcat grammar seems to be a mix of leetspeak, "Engrish" (bad translations from Japanese) and abbreviations commonly used in text messages passed between online video-gamers. There are no strict rules, but in general the verb "are" becomes "r" or "be" or "is," and "have" always becomes "has." "The" must always be written "teh." The rest is easy - you try to write like a bad translation from Japanese (and people will actually resort to computer translation programs to do this), then just misspell the other words as badly as you can, usually by writing them phonetically. And you sprinkle "z"s promiscuously. It ends up reading like a kind of hyper-cute Engrish.

The language interests linguists, of course, and it has been described as a pidgin, which is one step up from a dialect toward becoming a full-fledged language. Another step up from pidgin and it becomes a Creole (or, as one lolcat analyst suggests, a "cweeole").

One word that consistently comes up in describing certain recurring structures of lolcat-speak is the term "snowclone." This idea is the invention of the linguists Mark Liberman and Geoffrey Pullum, who write the popular "Language Log" blog. A snowclone is a form of cliché that takes the structure of a famous sentence and substitutes new parts. It comes from the myth that the Inuit have 11 (or 20 or 37) different words for snow. Tired journalists use this idea to write a hackneyed sentence about some other culture that goes like this: "If the Eskimos have 11 words for snow, then Iranians should have 20 words for privacy." The formula can be endlessly repeated: "If the Eskimos have 20 words for snow, then X must have Y words for N." Other formulaic phrases like this are "X is the new Y," or "In X, no one can hear you Y." The linguist David Crystal calls these structures "catch structures."

Lolcatese is often based on such catch structures or snowclones. Grown-ups don't recognize these snowclones because the formulae may come from gamerspeak or from the dramatized sequences of Japanese video games. Variations of the phrase "im in ur base killing ur d00ds" (apparently, a famously hilarious joke to players of Warcraft III) are a commonplace of lolcatese, where the sentence "im in ur x, ying your n" is frequently varied.

The blogger Anil Dash argues that there is a grammar to this pidgin, and as with all pidgins, it is possible to speak it incorrectly. Some enthusiasts have called this language "kitteh" (or "lol-kitteh") - you can read a list of basic grammatical rules at icanhascheezburger.com.

The difference between this and a traditional pidgin is that pidgins evolve when speakers of different languages form a hybrid, a sort of simplified conflation of two or more languages, in order to communicate more easily. Whereas kitteh exists as a deliberate (though humorous) barrier to understanding. In other words, pidgins exist to further communication between culturally distinct groups, whereas kitteh is a kind of code that can only be understood by insiders who share a culture (in this case a subculture). But it would be exciting to think that the Internet alone may be in the process of creating an entirely new language. Kthxbai.

rsmith@globeandmail.com

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