we’re taking a group of people who have insider knowledge of the English language (or at least a good grasp of it) and placing them in a new, unfamiliar, virtual space. This space introduces visual aids to language in the form of photos and gifs, the ability to comment on someone else’s text in a reblog and the ability to communicate a lot of information in very few words using hashtags. We also see the creation of tone in a toneless medium. In order to simulate conversational patterns in writing we SHOUT WHEN WE’RE SUPER EXCITED or *psssst whisper when we’re pretending to tell someone a secret while perfectly aware that anyone on the internet can read what we’re saying.* slash the coolest bit tho is that u can like ironically forgo all capitalization and punctuation just write in a weird speech pattern its ok everyone will still understand maybe it even helps read the text more quickly because nothing is interrupting the flow of words
In short, this dialect results when people who already share a language are given new tools. The result isn’t a butchering of English language but a creative experiment with it. Am I claiming that the Internet as a whole is operating on a level of postmodernism that would make Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut and Thomas Pynchon seem like novices? maybe i am maybe im not u punk wut of it like who r u to tell me otherwise
—
Tia Baheri: “Your Ability to Can Even: A Defense of Internet Linguistics“ | The Toast
Totally worth reading the whole article, especially the part on Tumblr and gender.
(via i-come-by-it-honestly)
Internet linguistics is super fascinating to me.
(via mumblingsage)
This whole article is absolutely fascinating. As someone who is older than the average tumblr user, and someone who can be a bit of a grammar freak, it took me a long time to get used to the Tumblrisms, but now I find them incredibly useful.
(via porcupine-girl)
#linguistics#internet dialects#PRESCRIPTIVISTS GO HOME
(via thymey)
“it took me a long time to get used to the Tumblrisms, but now I find them incredibly useful.” Same. All the internet speak that people my age usually malign, I find flexible and expressive and important.
Some people especially don’t like the term “feels” but I find it really helpful. “Feels” are not “emotions”. Emotions are specific, partitioned states. Feels are the simultaneous experience of all emotions (including emotions that would usually be framed as neutralizing one another if occurring simultaneously—happy/sad—but which often amplify each other instead) that are presently occurring as an immediate or on-going reaction to an inciting incident (image, movie, etc.). “All my feels” is a way to express both the totality and the immensity of those emotions being experienced.
Following that, “right in the feels” is how to express that a secondary inciting incident has occurred which, like one molecule in motion intersecting with another molecule in motion, has effected an impact and a temporary or permanent change in state/velocity/trajectory of the total-state of emotions affecting the speaker and, if the impact is strong enough, may permanently alter the composition of the feels in question.
How damn cool is it to be able to sum up both the initial concept and the experience—with a gif (a tiny movie that, like a hologram, contains the whole of the original as well as the subcultural context around that movie and that scene and that character), no less?

(via hedwig-dordt)
In my last year of university, I took a postmodern theory class that hinged on the relationship of text and image as a fundamental binary along the lines of male and female, logic and emotion, etc., in which text was valorised over image. One of the things I love about tumblr is the way images and gifs invade the communicative territory of text, and the perscriptivist notion of grammar is completely abandoned.
(via unreconstructedfangirl)
(via nine-worlds-geekfest)
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