Internet Linguistics Teaching Resources

The field of Internet Linguistics is rapidly changing and growing. If you're interested in teaching an Internet Linguistics course (or just interested in the topic in general), feel free to look through this list of readings I compiled for my class in Spring 2019. Topics covered include internet history, orthography, variation between platforms, research methods, and the sociolinguistics of identity formation. The list includes page length of each source as well as a short overview of its content.

Internet Linguistics Blog

Musings about interesting features of internet language I've come across

Yeet as a discourse particle

Several linguists have discussed the new meanings of "lol" and how it often seems to be serving as a discourse particle in written conversation (and sometimes even in spoken conversation!). When I asked my students what other internet-isms they thought might have taken on a discourse-particle-like function, I was expecting answers like "smh", "tbh", and "uwu". What I got instead were "yeehaw" and "yeet". The discussion of yeet in particular led to some animated debate, though most ended up on the side agreeing that it can be used as a discourse particle in some situations, both in text and verbally.

For those not familiar, "yeet" is a word that is said to have originated from a Vine video in which someone is handed an empty bottle and says "This bitch empty. Yeet!" and throws it as hard as they can. It may have originated even earlier in AAE communities, but most are primarily familiar with the Vine version. Its primary use today seems to be as a verb, with the implication that it's a sort of ideophone for the action of throwing something forcefully.

To yeet: to throw something with force or to do something with vigor

The meaning has become more versatile over time, and can be used as a verb for a wide variety of situations. It can also be used as an exclamation or interjection, and in this capacity it seems to have begun to take on discourse-particle-like functions. Here are some examples of how my students have described how yeet can be used:

"I have still seen it in contexts such as "[insert terrible situation here] yeet!" It gives off a feeling that's a mix between "oh well!" "lol" and "I'm f*cked." It indicates that you are fully aware of how in trouble you probably are, you've made your peace with it, and now you can joke about it as a way to solicit laughs and sympathy from those around you."
"In the "this bitch empty.... YEET" vine, the word "yeet" communicates the girl's attitude towards being handed an empty can. In this case, "yeet" conveys her disappointment/frustration from being fooled, yet her refusal to be seriously affected by it, taking back control by making her own joke. More than a simple exclamation, "yeet" succinctly indicates the full emotional journey of the yeet girl."
"When I first encountered the word yeet, it was mainly used as a discourse particle. It was something people said at the end of sentences to basically show that they had accepted their fate. For example, something I often heard was, "I have 3 essays to write tonight, yeet!" In a case like this, yeet's function is something like "this is my reality, and there's nothing I can do about it." Another context I often heard it in was as a declaration of a positive emotion or state of being. For example, "I asked this person out and they said yes, yeet!" Here, yeet is still showing that they're accepting their fate, but it also adds emphasis to their positive emotions."

I think it's clear that the usage of yeet has not yet fully standardized, since there is still a lot of disagreement about how it can be used online, but many of my students expressed similar intuitions, which may mean that it's in the process of standardization. I think it's a particularly interesting example of internet language trends, first because it has provided an ideophone for an action, something that English generally lacks, and second because of its transformation from ideophone to verb and discourse particle. Especially interesting is the fact that the new discourse function of the word has colored students' interpretations of all of its uses, such as in the second quote above, where my student applies the new meaning to the original video where it was likely used more ideophonically.

I am curious to see how long this word sticks around and how it continues to change. I think it fills an interesting gap in the English lexicon, which may give it a higher chance of survival, but so I thought with the similar exclamation "yolo" from a few years back, which has now mostly fallen out of use.

Are aLteRnAtIng CaPs sing-song or sarcastic?

When I first began collecting corpora of data from Twitter in 2016, I didn't find a lot of examples of this kind of pattern, but where I did find it it seemed to serve a wide variety of functions. Overall I got the impression that it was meant to indicate rapid and over-exaggerated, almost sing-song-y rise and fall in pitch, and this could serve different functions depending on the context. Here are a few examples from my 2016 corpus:

Excitement:

also i'M S oOO exCITE FOR TAEYeon aND dean

Whining:

I want Thai food but I'm toooo brOke

Incredulity:

does kianna onlY banG white GuYs??❔❔

However, by the time I taught Internet Linguistics in Spring 2019, all of my students were in agreement that the pattern unambiguously indicated sarcasm. To be fair, the examples I list above are a little irregular in the pattern of upper/lower case, while the new unambiguously sarcastic examples are pretty regular about capitalized every other letter or some other very regular interval, so the pattern seems to have standardized somewhat.

The most fascinating part of this change is that it can be traced back pretty easily to one specific meme: Mocking Spongebob. Around 2017, a particular image macro of Spongebob from a scene where he pretends to be a chicken became the subject of a call-and-response type meme of this type:

Based on the mocking look that the Spongebob meme has, it's pretty easy to interpret this hypothetical exchange as Bf (the boyfriend) saying something and the writer repeating it back mockingly. From there, the dialog part of the meme became unnecessary and the image of Spongebob plus the alternating caps text alone indicated mocking or sarcasm, and eventually even the image seems to have become unnecessary. My students called what I refer to as alternating capitalization something like "Spongebob capitalization", which demonstrates that they're all still very aware of where their understanding of the pattern as sarcastic comes from, even in the absence of the image itself. I'm interested to see whether this is a passing trend or whether the sarcastic implications of the pattern stick around long enough that the origin is forgotten.

This is a fascinating example of language change in progress over a very short time. To be clear, I'm not claiming that the pattern didn't hold a sarcastic tone for some people before 2017 - in fact that would be necessary for it to have been first used that way in the image above - but the fact that it used to be much more variable and is now pretty well standardized both in form and in interpretation is pretty neat. This is exactly the kind of thing that Internet Linguists should be on the look-out for while it's still possibly to trace back the origins of a new feature or interpretation.

Thanks to the hardworking people at KnowYourMeme.com for always having the answers to meme etymology!

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