Leetspeak, a dialect? Rawful!

Is leetspeak a dialect or a jargon? If you think I'm crazy you can suck it.

A very particular dialect has been emerging over the past 20 years. It has no social, racial, geographic or economic restraints. It is a dialect that has arisen over the internet. Though many people have written off this form of speech as tech or gaming jargon, evidence does exist that “lolspeak” or “leetspeak” is becoming its own dialect with its own phonological, syntactic and grammatical rules. It is far from a homogeneous phenomenon, many people never change the way they talk over the internet. Yet it would appear that most people who use the internet as a social tool are well aware of the many idioms, grammar and acronyms people use to communicate with each other.

The most popular word used from the lol/leet speak vocabulary is “lol” this is pronounced [lawl] or /l –all/. It originates from the acronym “LOL” originally meaning “laughing out loud” used to indicate that the typist is laughing. What is most interesting about this word is how heavily it interacts with the written word, or typed form of communication. It seems to represent two major developmental changes in the history of netspeak; the first of these being the live chat experience, led by the original chatting interface, Prodigy, and continuing with the very popular instant messaging program, Aol Instant Messenger or (AIM). Through this time many acronyms became well known and shared through many different chatting programs. Almost all of these were referred to by their long name, “lol” was pronounced “l. o. l.” an other terms such as “rofl” (Rolling on the floor laughing), “lmao” (laughing my ass off), “brb” (be right back), or “ttyl” (talk to you later) were also being pronounced as acronyms. However a second change occurred in the online community at the advent of Voice Over IP technology, an accessible vocal chatting interface. These emerging programs mostly affected the gaming community at first, and then became popular through voice chatting programs such as Skype. In this environment – people found themselves comfortable using the terms and acronyms known to them through the chatting interface, but suddenly found it awkward to spell out the fact that they were laughing. Due to this change, a more appropriate pronunciation of these acronyms were developed: “lol” became /lawl/ and “rofl” became /rawful/. Perhaps the most interesting ending to this morphological tale, is that the new pronunciations are now being transcribed into typing use. An often used replacement for “lol” is now “lawl”, a phonemic representation of the spoken word.

There are also some prefixes and suffixes that have arisen in this dialect that have morphemic value. For example the popular suffix –zor (sometimes –zors, –xors) has been to change the semantic value of the word it attaches to. Le Blanc claims that the etymology of this suffix is derived from gamers referring to some sort of event or act to be a cheap shot, good luck, or a cheat as being “haxzor” derived from the word “hacker”. Notice that in many of these terms the word can act as both a noun or an adjective; this fact is created by the suffix –xor. For example when asked through a vocal chat interface if the following sentence were grammatical of 100 gamers:

[That gear is haxzors] was thought to be grammatical by 98 of the players,
[She is a hacker] was thought to be grammatical by 100 of the players,
[That gear is hacker] was thought to be grammatical by only 8 of the players.

It is clear that the morpheme –zors seems to be acting as a morpheme changing a noun to and adjective when attached to hack- or hax-.

I intend to collect data from an internet social group contained within and Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game. In World of Warcraft, a popular online game with over 7 million subscribers, there are social groups known as guilds. These guilds range between ten and one thousand people. Like the survey mentioned above, I will ask similar questions to these players as well as collect samples of everyday conversation.

The internet moves much faster than real life in many respects. You can interact with dozens of people at the same time and instantly meet people from around the country and world in a matter of seconds. Perhaps the evolution of language is accelerated in online communities as well. Professor Ray Costello said in one of his lectures, “Most of the oddities in English spelling arise from a sense of history in the language, spelling that was phonetic once – in Latin, Greek, German, Old and Middle English. While the history to us, is appealing and interesting, I wonder if the language will ever change to fit the world it lives in today.” Perhaps this is what Professor Costello meant, that one day a large group of individuals would return to a more phonetic pronunciation of every day words. People greet each other every day with a casual “Hi”, not knowing that its orthography does not reflect dip-thong that is pronounced in the word, more and more people however, are online greeting one another with “Hai” a step closer to its phonetic representation [Haj].



In conclusion: powned.