DoggoLingo is an Internet language that is created from word conversion, meme lexicon, and onomatopoeia. Emerging in the 2010s,[1] DoggoLingo is implied to be a dog's own idiom, and is presented as a canine's thought process. Elyse Graham, assistant professor at Stony Brook University, describes DoggoLingo as "upbeat, joyful, and clueless in a relentlessly friendly way".[2]
Structure and usage
editDoggoLingo appends various diminutive suffixes "-o", "-er", "-ino" to existing English words (e.g. dog turns into doggo,[3] pup turns into pupper[4]) as well as DoggoLingo words that have been created (e.g. pupper turns into pupperino).[1] DoggoLingo relies heavily upon onomatopoeia: Words such as mlem or blep describe the action of a dog sticking out its tongue, or other forms of facial expression.[5][6]
Much like a creole language, DoggoLingo follows a similar rudimentary style to create its verbs (e.g. doin me a in place of present participles with the speaker as object, such as doin me a scare "scaring me") and adjectives (e.g. heckin in place of degree modifiers such as extremely). 'Heck' is frequently used in place of more conventional expletives.[7]
Some words also come from eye dialect spellings of English words, such as fren, meaning "friend".[7] In 2023, an analyst from the Southern Poverty Law Center noted the term fren having been adopted as a deliberately "innocuous" and "baby talk" self-description by the far-right online, with the word being used as a backronym for "far-right ethnonationalist".[8]
Origin
editDoggoLingo emerged in the 2010s.[1] Various social media accounts such as WeRateDogs on Twitter and Dogspotting on Facebook, as well as social news aggregation and imageboard websites like 4chan, Reddit, or Tumblr have aided in popularizing the use of DoggoLingo by consistently using or hosting content that uses the lingo on their Internet pages. In 2014, the Dogspotting Facebook account gained popularity, especially in Australia where adding "-o" to the end of words is also a feature of Australian slang.[3] Usage of DoggoLingo peaked around 2017.[1]
Linguist Gretchen McCulloch characterized the language as "taking on characteristics of how people would address their animals in the first place", and noted that it was used by people talking as themselves online, in contrast to the mid-2000s lolcat trend where images of cats were captioned as if the cat were speaking.[3]
Other animals
edit
Many other animals are referred to differently in DoggoLingo: for example, one might refer to a snake as a snek or danger noodle,[9][10] a human as a hooman[11][12] and a bird as a birb.[10] Fat or rotund birds may be called borbs, while birds with fluffy feathers are referred to as floofs.[13]
See also
editReferences
edit- ^ a b c d "What Does doggo Mean?". Everything After Z by Dictionary.com. Retrieved 2020-04-10.
- ^ "The weird underside of DoggoLingo - OxfordWords blog". OxfordWords blog. 2017-08-01. Archived from the original on 2019-04-02. Retrieved 2018-02-26.
- ^ a b c Boddy, Jessica (April 23, 2017). "Dogs Are Doggos: An Internet Language Built Around Love For The Puppers". NPR. Retrieved October 3, 2021.
- ^ "PUPPER (noun) definition and synonyms". Macmillan Dictionary. Retrieved 2020-04-10.
- ^ "What Does mlem Mean?". Everything After Z by Dictionary.com. Retrieved 2020-04-10.
- ^ "blep Meaning & Origin | Slang by Dictionary.com". Dictionary.com. 2019-05-13. Retrieved 2024-08-06.
- ^ a b Golbeck, Jennifer; Buntain, Cody (2018). "This Paper is About Lexical Propagation on Twitter. H*ckin Smart. 12/10. Would Accept!". 2018 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM). pp. 587–590. doi:10.1109/ASONAM.2018.8508445. ISBN 978-1-5386-6051-5. S2CID 53080084.
- ^ Tangalakis-Lippert, Katherine. "Elon Musk pulled Twitter from the EU's anti-disinformation agreement and continues to troll with alt-right memes and dogwhistles. It could be a sign he'll close the site to Europe completely". Business Insider. Retrieved 11 June 2023.
- ^ "What Does snek Mean?". Dictionary.com. 27 June 2018. Retrieved April 10, 2020.
- ^ a b Elbein, Asher (December 12, 2019). "When Is a Bird a 'Birb'? An Extremely Important Guide". Audubon. Retrieved October 8, 2022.
- ^ Hannen, Missy (January 16, 2018). "Dogs remind us to be hooman". Vanguard. Retrieved October 8, 2022.
- ^ Mishra, Shubhi (June 22, 2022). "Adorable video of a doggo waiting for his little hooman at bus stop goes viral. Watch". India Today. Retrieved October 8, 2022.
- ^ "What's the Difference Between a 'Borb' and a 'Floof'? | Audubon". www.audubon.org. 2020-03-10. Retrieved 2024-08-06.