I’m a Dialectologist. Get Meowt There!

A dialectological look at how we talk about cats online

Get meowt there! Out there is the digital realm of cat-related spaces where I am following cats and their humans, where I see lots of cat photos and cat videos, and where I am observing language. Actually what I am really out there for is language variation of the cat kind because I am a dialectologist always on the look out for dialects.

Why don’t you follow meowt there and look – in addition to all the cute kitty pictures – at language. What you’ll find are words, spellings, and pieces of grammar that are typical for the cat-related digital spaces and make up the cat-inspired language varieties, or purrieties as I call them, which is short for “purr varieties”.

A Purriety is a Dialect with a Purr and a Meow

Once out there, we’ll encounter not just one but four purrieties. While cats remain cute regardless of the digital space, the communities and in turn the language varieties differ. In my dealings with the online kitties, I have noticed a minimum of four distinct purrieties of English: there’s LOLspeak, there’s Hambspeak, there’s Cat, and there are meowlogisms. At the same time, it’s difficult to really separate cat-related language varieties from each other as, in some cases, they overlap – just like real dialects of a language.

When it comes to the differentiating dialects and languages, we’ll adapt Weinreich’s quip “A language is a dialect with an army and a navy” to “A purriety is a dialect with a purr and a meow”. While the distinction between language and dialect is political in some cases, for example with Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian, we do not fight with armies and navies for our cat-inspired dialects but perhaps with purr, meow, fur, paw, and even claws.

But how do we get from what is out there to those four purrieties mentioned above? Let’s start at the beginning. The way we go on about it depends on what we want to find out and on how much we already know. What we are interested in out there are the language forms people use in their cat communities, the topics they are talking about, their interaction with each other, and differences in how various cat communities communicate.

As cat-related language variation is a somewhat tongue-in-cheek research topic, we do not find a lot on it in existing linguistic research (see Find out More). So we rely on the basic definitions of dialects and sociolects as well as on the basic methods of dialectology with wordlists and surveys and go from there. We know that dialects differ from each other in their grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation, that language variation can be regional (dialects) and social (sociolects).

Now because the communities are rather unknown, we’ll decide to do Linguistic Ethnography to study our language variation. In Linguistic Ethnography we observe the communities and perhaps even become part of the community long enough until we have enough language material to properly describe our communities.

Let’s take the example of a black cat community. As we do not know much about the dialect of our community, we cannot refer to existing word lists or surveys and have to create those lists ourselves. We take notes in the field, send memos to ourselves to remember what has caught our eyes, like specific words such as ‘mini-panther’, #PanfurThursday, and ‘depantherise’. We notice that our black cat community has created the verb ‘depantherise’ as in “I have been depantherised” to say that a black cat has jumped down from its sitting position on the human’s lap.

Being linguists out in the field, we also categorise our findings. In our depantherisation case, we are dealing with vocabulary – we have the word ‘panther’ for black cat – and word formation as in ‘depantherise’ with the prefix ‘de-’ and the suffix ‘-ise’. And we go on from there – collecting, categorising, describing, and sometimes asking community members about their use of language.

As we follow many cats online – after all, cats are cute -, we also notice that there are differences between various communities. While one community uses ‘panther’ or ‘panfur’ for black cat, another uses the term ‘void’. We are faced with the tricky questions if we are dealing with a different dialect or with a variation within the dialect and if we have a language variety at all. My take is that purrieties do have the status of a language variety because they fulfil the criteria of having a different vocabulary and grammar. And if we take spelling as a representation of pronunciation, then we have a different pronunciation as well. Note to self: Linguistics would classify purrieties as Special Internet Language Varieties.

In the offline world, where one dialect ends and another begins is often an arbitrary decision which has nothing to do with geographical or national borders. Well, geographic entities like rivers or mountains might help in separating varieties but national borders do not, unless armies and navies come into play. In the online world, that is more difficult to say because we cannot rely on geography or nationality. The only differentiating factor we have are the various social media platforms, which, because of their different set-up, all have their very own way of communicating, and that is a workable hypothesis: LOLspeak is used on the ICanHazaCheezburger website, Hambspeak purriety originated actually in the Facebook group “This Cat is Chonky”, and meowlogisms are common on Instagram, and Cat is a purriety I found on Twitter and now on Bluesky.

Coming back to the ‘panther/panfur’ vs ‘void’ question, we will find that both forms for black cat are used on social media platforms and all could come down to a personal preference for one or the other.

We are Cats Out There!

Purrieties are more than a play language because they also have a social function. They create identity and show community membership. The linguistic theory that identity is shaped by language receives a feline twist out there: Using a purriety means pretending to be a cat. When we catify our postings, we signal to our followers that “it’s the cat speaking now”. Two things are interesting from a sociolinguistic point of view. One, this shift in identity from human to cat is accompanied by a change in language. And two, this double identity of human and cat is accepted by the cat-related communities. For simplicity’s sake, we also accept the human cat identity here in this article when we talk about online cat communities.

When we become part of an online cat community, we adapt our language to that of the community we are part of and we use the purriety the other cat account holders use. Our community might use something LOLspeak-based like Cat, or more like Hambspeak, or meowlogisms. Incidentally or not, the linguistic theory behind that behaviour is abbreviated CAT (Communication Accommodation Theory).

The various cat-related digital spaces have their own linguistic environment to which we adapt when we become part of one or more of these communities. Each of these purrieties has its own grammar, vocabulary, and spelling. Actually, we interpret spelling as the visual representation of the accents the cats have online.

While most of the online cats communicate in writing, a new development includes voicing the cats and their thoughts. Easy to use technology makes it possible even for not-so-tech-savvy people to put audio onto a video. There are reels with human-voiced sound bites accompanying video reels. Some are voiced by computer-generated voices (watch a reel by Milo the Chonk on Instagram and you know what I mean. Milo has got a male RP accent by the way) or by real people (there’s German-speaking Cosmo with his brother the Russian-accented Apollo), and there are voice artists doing the soundtracks of cats (high baby-like voices) – all with (auto-generated) subtitles.

Da Purrieties Out There

What started as a gut feeling about cat-related online language varieties has finally come together as a description of four purrieties: LOLspeak, Hambspeak, Cat, and meowlogisms. There are probably more purrieties out there, but our sampling has included only communities where members use one of these four. Let’s look at them briefly here:

“Da kittehz can haz LOLspeak” (LOLspeak)

LOLspeak is the language variety originally used on the website ICanHazCheezburger and in the LOLcat Bible project in the noughties. LOLspeak has a very clearly defined setting: It is used on memes in white letters outlined in black superimposed on a cat image. In the LOLcat Bible, several characters recur on a regular basis: We’ve got Ceiling Cat (God), Basement Cat (devil), Happy Cat (Jesus), and cheezburgers abound in the translation. LOLspeak grammar includes non-standard plurals (“foodz, waterz, kittehz”), verb forms like the eponymous “I can haz” formula, “maded”, or “eated”, and reduplication to emphasise a meaning as in “lublublub” for “love”. There are codified typos like “teh” and “pwn” for “the” and “own”.

From a sociolinguistic point of view, the interesting fact is that community members showed a clear awareness of LOLspeak. One, they had a name for it and called it LOLspeak. And two, there was a clear sense of a speech community with in-groups and out-groups. LOLspeak may sound like baby voice but it is much more complicated than that, which community members pointed out to newbies who may have thought they could write anything non-standard.

“fOR T H I C C cAT pls TO PUT hEre. NO ELSE.” This Cat is Chonky group (Hambspeak)

Next one up is Hambspeak, which developed in the Facebook group “This Cat is Chonky”, a group devoted to sharing cat photos. Not much else is known about its origins. Just like with ICanHazCheezburger and the LOLcat Bible, there is a group, but unlike those, the group is more inclusive. The rules state that the group is all about good vibes with the extra warning that no chonk shaming, no politics, no medical advice is allowed.

The purriety used in this group is called “Hambspeak”, which derives from ‘hamb’ the group word for ‘cat’. Community members know its specific words, like ‘chonk’ (rotund cat) and ‘cat tax’ (post a cat image to introduce ourselves). Hambspeak is more about non-standard words and spelling rather than non-standard grammar.

As for the words out there, we find a very helpful three-page A-Z dictionary of Hambspeak compiled by a community member. In there, we have community-typical words like ‘smol’ (a thin, tiny cat), ‘bois’ and ‘girls’ as well as words also used by other cat account holders like ‘void’ (black cat), ‘torties’ (tortoiseshell cats) with ‘tortitude’ (the special attitude of a tortie), and others. Spelling in Hambspeak is a mix of upper and lower case letters with punctuation marks thrown in at unlikely places, and special non-English characters.

“I gawtt tue bea da “owtsydde boi” beclaws itt iz 80° inn Meowsachusetts, eben thowe itt snowued layst wike” Citizen Bernard (Catspeak)

Out there we also come across Catspeak, people also call it “Cat’shese, ca’atish, de langwidge ov de resistens, cate tieping, Cate speek, cat speak/catspeak, Meow-glish, Meowri, Purrsian, Catanese, Kitty talk”. At least, those were the answers I received when I asked three cat account holders and their followers on Bluesky about what they call the language they use. Cat sounds like baby voices in writing, with a phonetic spelling that differs between the users. Grammar is … well, we find non-standard plurals and non-standard verb forms. But it’s mostly spelling that catches our eye when it comes to Cat.

Cat is sometimes wrongly categorised as LOLspeak. It is not LOLspeak as such, but it is related and perhaps evolved from LOLspeak. Cat may look like LOLspeak at first glance but there are differences. For Cat we have a different social environment and a different social awareness. What are the differences? Well, LOLspeak occurs on memes, Cat does not. Cat is used by everyday family members to describe everyday activities. No meme in sight. Then, LOLspeak has a name and a function community users are very much aware of. Cat speakers, however, just say that there is no real name as “it’s just Cat, that’s what the cat uses”. The misspellings and the non-standard grammar are very individual and not codified in Cat, and that, too, is unlike LOLspeak.

“Meowsachussetts” and “beclaws” (meowlogisms)

Meowlogisms, which is a blending of ‘meow’ and ‘neologisms’, are actually called portmanteau words in linguistics. Now while ‘portamanteau word’ might be the correct term in linguistics, the word ‘meowlogism’ expresses its meaning much better. By blending meowphemes (meow morphemes) like ‘meow, purr, paw, fur, claw’, and the cat-likes with an existing word, we get the cat-like twist needed. Our own imagination is the limit when we create meowlogisms.

Meowlogisms are easy to form and as such are easy to understand by non-native speakers of English, which is why we find meowlogism users on social media and outside it in the news and books – whenever we need to indicate that a cat is involved. “Purrfect, pawsome, ameowzing” are very common meowlogisms online, and there are many more meowlogisms to collect. We just need to keep our eyes open for the meowphemes.

Get meowt there!

Now let’s hope you have enjoyed your short trip into the realm of online cats and the language variation that you find out there. As for me, I am off now to join a box pawty with meowjitos and tunatinis for my cat and silly linguistic fun for me. Fank mew for reading.

Special Internet Language Variety: are playful variants of the standard language in sub-cultural online contexts such as gaming, hacking, in a desire on the part of the users to make their writing humorous, decorative and/or obscure

Find out more:

Podhovnik, E. (2023). Purrieties of Language. How We Talk about Cats Online. (Si apre in una nuova finestra)Cambridge University Press.

Gawne, L. & Vaughan, J. (2012). I can haz language play: The construction of language and identity in LOLspeak. In M. Ponsonnet, L. Dao & M. Bowler (Eds), Proceedings of the 42nd Australian Linguistic Society Conference – 2011, Australian National University, Canberra ACT, 2-4 December 2011