Because Internet

by Gretchen McCulloch

  Perhaps the biggest thanks of all to Lauren Gawne, my cohost on Lingthusiasm. Not just for cracking the emoji chapter by introducing me to gesture research, but also for countless helpful comments, both in the manuscript and when I couldn’t look at the manuscript anymore. I never expected to find myself in one of those fabled business partnerships one reads about and I’m so grateful to have ended up there with you.

  Notes

  Chapter 1. Informal Writing

  In the year 800: James Westfall Thompson. 1960. The Literacy of the Laity in the Middle Ages. Burt Franklin.

  informal survey: Gretchen McCulloch. November 24, 2015. twitter.com/GretchenAMcC/status/669255229729341441.

  the word “rhinoceros”: Douglas Harper. 2001–2018. “Rhino.” Online Etymological Dictionary. www.etymonline.com/word/rhino.

  One study showed: T. Florian Jaeger and Celeste Kidd. 2008. “Toward a Unified Model of Redundancy Avoidance and Strategic Lengthening.” Presented at the 21st Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, March 2008, Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

  new symbols such as & and %: Keith Houston. June 26, 2011. “The Ampersand,” part 2 of 2. Shady Characters. www.shadycharacters.co.uk/2011/06/the-ampersand-part-2-of-2/. Keith Houston. March 17, 2015. “Miscellany No. 59: The Percent Sign.” Shady Characters. www.shadycharacters.co.uk/2015/03/percent-sign/.

  The word “acronym” itself entered English: S. V. Baum. 1955. “From ‘Awol’ to ‘Veep’: The Growth and Specialization of the Acronym.” American Speech 30(2). pp. 103–110.

  After the war, acronyms just kept proliferating: Ben Zimmer. December 16, 2010. “Acronym.” The New York Times Magazine. www.nytimes.com/2010/12/19/magazine/19FOB-onlanguage-t.html.

  Roman orator Quintilian: Adam Kendon. 2004. Gesture: Visible Action as Utterance. Cambridge University Press. Quintilian. 1922. Institutio Oratoria, trans. H. E. Butler (Loeb Classical Library). Heinemann.

  Chapter 2. Language and Society

  A German dialectologist named Georg Wenker: Stefan Dollinger. 2015. The Written Questionnaire in Social Dialectology: History, Theory, Practice. John Benjamins.

  if one teacher wrote “Affe”: Charles Boberg. 2013. “Surveys: The Use of Written Questionnaires.” In Christine Mallinson, Becky Childs, and Gerard Van Herk, eds., Data Collection in Sociolinguistics: Methods and Applications. Routledge.

  The fieldworker he selected was a grocer: J. K. Chambers and Peter Trudgill. 1998. Dialectology, 2nd ed. Cambridge University Press.

  In each village, he interviewed: Jules Gilliéron and Edmond Edmont. 2017. Atlas Linguistique de la France. GIPSA-Lab and CLLE-UMR 5263. cartodialect.imag.fr/cartoDialect/.

  Both Wenker’s and Gilliéron’s dialect maps: Taylor Jones. September 28, 2014. “Big Data and Black Twitter.” Language Jones. www.languagejones.com/blog-1/2014/9/26/big-data-and-black-twitter.

  Or you can read Wenker’s hand-drawn map: Lisa Minnick. January 10, 2012. “From Marburg to Miami: Putting Language Variation on the Map.” Functional Shift. functionalshift.wordpress.com/2012/01/10/miami/.

  44,000 completed surveys: Stefan Dollinger. 2015. The Written Questionnaire in Social Dialectology: History, Theory, Practice. John Benjamins.

  sent out fieldworkers: August Rubrecht. 2005. “Life in a DARE Word Wagon. Do You Speak American?” www.pbs.org/speak/seatosea/americanvarieties/DARE/wordwagon/. Jesse Sheidlower. September 22, 2017. “The Closing of a Great American Dialect Project.” The New Yorker. www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-closing-of-a-great-american-dialect-project.

  The Atlas of North American English: William Labov, Sharon Ash, and Charles Boberg. 2005. The Atlas of North American English: Phonetics, Phonology and Sound Change. Walter de Gruyter. www.atlas.mouton-content.com/.

  In 2002, the Harvard Dialect Survey: Bert Vaux and Scott Golder. 2003. The Harvard Dialect Survey. Harvard University Linguistics Department. dialect.redlog.net/.

  massively popular New York Times dialect quiz: Josh Katz and Wilson Andrews. December 21, 2013. “How Y’all, Youse and You Guys Talk.” The New York Times. www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/upshot/dialect-quiz-map.html.

  Regardless of who technically has access: Alice E. Marwick and danah boyd. 2011. “I Tweet Honestly, I Tweet Passionately: Twitter Users, Context Collapse, and the Imagined Audience.” New Media & Society 13(1). pp. 114–133.

  When the Library of Congress announced: Matt Raymond. April 14, 2010. “How Tweet It Is! Library Acquires Entire Twitter Archive.” Library of Congress Blog. blogs.loc.gov/loc/2010/04/how-tweet-it-is-library-acquires-entire-twitter-archive/.

  “What’s up, posterity?”: Alex Baze. April 16, 2010. twitter.com/bazecraze/status/12308452064.

  “Please index all my kitten pictures”: understandblue. April 15, 2010. twitter.com/understandblue/status/12247489441.

  The personal data derived: Jamie Doward, Carole Cadwalladr, and Alice Gibbs. March 4, 2017. “Watchdog to Launch Inquiry into Misuse of Data in Politics.” The Guardian. www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/mar/04/cambridge-analytics-data-brexit-trump

  Both of these findings: Jacob Eisenstein. 2014. “Identifying Regional Dialects in Online Social Media.” www.cc.gatech.edu/~jeisenst/papers/dialectology-chapter.pdf. Kelly Servick. February 15, 2015. “Are yinz frfr? What Your Twitter Dialect Says About Where You Live.” Science. news.sciencemag.org/social-sciences/2015/02/are-yinz-frfr-what-your-twitter-dialect-says-about-where-you-live.

  Other features he found on Twitter: Jacob Eisenstein, Brendan O’Connor, Noah A. Smith, and Eric P. Xing. 2014. “Diffusion of Lexical Change in Social Media.” PLOS ONE 9(11). Public Library of Science. e113114. doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0113114.

  Beyond just reinforcing the informal intuition: Jack Grieve, Andrea Nini, Diansheng Guo, and Alice Kasakoff. 2015. “Using Social Media to Map Double Modals in Modern American English.” Presented at New Ways of Analyzing Variation 44, October 22–25, 2015, Toronto.

  somewhat milder terms: Jack Grieve. July 16, 2015. “A Few Swear Word Maps.” Research Blog. sites.google.com/site/jackgrieveaston/treesandtweets.

  The example quotations for “mafted”: Katherine Connor Martin. 2017. “New Words Notes September 2017.” The Oxford English Dictionary Today. public.oed.com/the-oed-today/recent-updates-to-the-oed/september-2017-update/new-words-notes-september-2017/.

  It’s a little bit harder: Rachael Tatman. 2015. “# go awn: Sociophonetic Variation in Variant Spellings on Twitter.” Working Papers of the Linguistics Circle of the University of Victoria 25(2). p. 97.

  sound, and this particular spelling: Jane Stuart-Smith. 2004. “Scottish English: Phonology.” In Bernd Kortmann and Edgar W. Schneider, eds., A Handbook of Varieties of English 1. De Gruyter. pp. 47–67.

  “the private and personal word-creations”: David Crystal. December 1, 2008. “On Kitchen Table Lingo.” DCBLOG. david-crystal.blogspot.ca/2008/12/on-kitchen-table-lingo.html.

  Queen Elizabeth II: Richard Kay. July 17, 2015. “Think George Is a Little Monkey? You Were WORSE, Wills: The Pictures That Show How Little Terror Prince Is Taking After His Naughty Daddy.” Daily Mail. www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3165864/Think-George-little-monkey-WORSE-Wills-pictures-little-terror-prince-taking-naughty-daddy.html.

  language and high school cliques: Penelope Eckert. 1989. Jocks and Burnouts: Social Categories and Identity in the High School. Teachers College Press. Penelope Eckert. 2004. “Adolescent Language.” In Edward Finegan and John Rickford, eds., Language in the USA. Cambridge University Press. pp. 361–374.

  vowel change going on: William Labov. 2011. Principles of Linguistic Change, vol. 3: Cognitive and Cultural Factors. John Wiley & Sons. p. 65. See also www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5220090.

  features linked to intellectualism: Mary Bucholtz. 1996. “Geek the Girl: Language, Femininity, and Female Nerds.” In Natasha Warner, Jocelyn Ahlers, Leela Bilmes, Monica Oliver,
Suzanne Wertheim, and Melinda Chen, eds., Gender and Belief Systems. Berkeley Women and Language Group. pp. 119–131.

  A study of Latinas: Norma Mendoza-Denton. 1996. “Language Attitudes and Gang Affiliation Among California Latina Girls.” In Natasha Warner, Jocelyn Ahlers, Leela Bilmes, Monica Oliver, Suzanne Wertheim, and Melindwileya Chen, eds., Gender and Belief Systems. Berkeley: Berkeley Women and Language Group. pp. 478–486.

  study in Panama City: Henrietta Cedergren. 1988. “The Spread of Language Change: Verifying Inferences of Linguistic Diffusion.” In Peter H. Lowenberg, ed., Language Spread and Language Policy: Issues, Implications, and Case Studies. Georgetown University Press. pp. 45–60. Sali A. Tagliamonte and Alexandra D’Arcy. 2009. “Peaks Beyond Phonology: Adolescence, Incrementation, and Language Change.” Language 85(1). pp. 58–108.

  It’s been peaking in adolescence: Timothy Jay. 1992. Cursing in America: A Psycholinguistic Study of Dirty Language in the Courts, in the Movies, in the Schoolyards, and on the Streets. John Benjamins. Mike Thelwall. 2008. “Fk yea I swear: Cursing and Gender in MySpace.” Corpora 3(1). pp. 83–107.

  Researchers from Georgia Tech, Columbia, and Microsoft: Rahul Goel, Sandeep Soni, Naman Goyal, John Paparrizos, Hanna Wallach, Fernando Diaz, and Jacob Eisenstein. 2016. “The Social Dynamics of Language Change in Online Networks.” Proceedings of the International Conference on Social Informatics (SocInfo16). Springer International. pp. 41–57.

  the abbreviation “af”: Jacob Eisenstein, Brendan O’Connor, Noah A. Smith, and Eric P. Xing. 2014. “Diffusion of Lexical Change in Social Media.” PLOS ONE 9(11). Public Library of Science. e113114. doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0113114, journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0113114#s1.

  in 2014 and 2015, “af”: “AF” appeared in an end-of-year 2014 post, “20 Young Celebs That Were 2014 AF,” www.buzzfeed.com/christineolivo/2014-supernovas, in the list “Here’s What These Popular Dating Terms Really Mean” in July 2015, www.buzzfeed.com/kirstenking/single-as-fuq, and by late 2015 in “17 Dads Who Are Dad AF” www.buzzfeed.com/awesomer/dad-to-the-bone (October 2015), whereas earlier headlines contained F**k, “27 Animals Who Don’t Give a F**k,” www.buzzfeed.com/chelseamarshall/animals-who-dont-give-a-fk (2014), and F#@k, “30 Easy Steps to Not Give a F#@k,” www.buzzfeed.com/daves4/easy-steps-to-start-not-giving-a-f (2013).

  beer jargon: Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, Robert West, Dan Jurafsky, Jure Leskovec, and Christopher Potts. 2013. “No Country for Old Members: User Lifecycle and Linguistic Change in Online Communities.” Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on World Wide Web Pages. pp. 307–318.

  Adults periodically move: Jennifer Nycz. 2016. “Awareness and Acquisition of New Dialect Features.” In Anna M. Babel, ed., Awareness and Control in Sociolinguistic Research. Cambridge University Press. pp. 62–79.

  Framingham where researchers have followed: James H. Fowler and Nicholas A. Christakis. 2008. “Dynamic Spread of Happiness in a Large Social Network: Longitudinal Analysis over 20 Years in the Framingham Heart Study.” The BMJ 337: a2338.

  The traditional finding for gender: Suzanne Grégoire. 2006. “Gender and Language Change: The Case of Early Modern Women.” Unpublished manuscript, University of Toronto. Retrieved from homes.chass.utoronto.ca/~cpercy/courses/6362-gregoire.htm.

  Research in other centuries: William Labov. 1990. “The Intersection of Sex and Social Class in the Course of Linguistic Change.” Language Variation and Change 2(2). pp. 205–254.

  Young women are also consistently: Alexandra D’Arcy. 2017. Discourse-Pragmatic Variation in Context: Eight Hundred Years of LIKE. John Benjamins.

  in a paper he wrote in 1990: William Labov. 1990. “The Intersection of Sex and Social Class in the Course of Linguistic Change.” Language Variation and Change 2(2). pp. 205–254.

  Lots of reasons: Suzanne Romaine. 2005. “Variation in Language and Gender.” In Janet Holmes and Miriam Meyerhoff, eds., The Handbook of Language and Gender. Blackwell.

  linguists Susan Herring and John Paolillo: Susan C. Herring and John C. Paolillo. 2006. “Gender and Genre Variation in Weblogs.” Journal of Sociolinguistics 10(4). pp. 439–459.

  looking at a corpus of 14,000 Twitter users: David Bamman, Jacob Eisenstein, and Tyler Schnoebelen. 2014. “Gender Identity and Lexical Variation in Social Media.” Journal of Sociolinguistics 18(2). pp. 135–160.

  changing the vowel in “car”: Lesley Milroy. 1980. Language and Social Networks. Blackwell.

  strong and weak ties: James Milroy and Lesley Milroy. 1985. “Linguistic Change, Social Network and Speaker Innovation.” Journal of Linguistics 21(2). pp. 339–384.

  Strong ties are people: Mark S. Granovetter. 1973. “The Strength of Weak Ties.” American Journal of Sociology 78(6). pp. 1360–1380.

  English and Icelandic: Magnús Fjalldal. 2005. Anglo-Saxon England in Icelandic Medieval Texts. University of Toronto Press.

  Fagyal and colleagues: Zsuzsanna Fagyal, Samarth Swarup, Anna María Escobar, Les Gasser, and Kiran Lakkaraju. 2010. “Centers and Peripheries: Network Roles in Language Change.” Lingua 120(8). pp. 2061–2079.

  between four and twenty-six: Economist Staff. February 26, 2009. “Primates on Facebook.” The Economist. www.economist.com/node/13176775.

  titles of three books: Kevin Major. 2001. Eh? to Zed: A Canadian Abecedarium. Illustrator: Alan Daniel. Red Deer Press. Anne Chisholm. 1993. From Eh to Zed: Cookbook of Canadian Culinary Heritage. Food Lovers’ Canada. David DeRocco and John Sivell. 1996. Canada from Eh to Zed. Illustrator: Christine Porter. Full Blast Productions.

  Indeed, noted Chambers, “zed”: J. K. Chambers. 2002. Sociolinguistic Theory: Linguistic Variation and Its Social Significance, 2nd ed. Blackwell.

  “in middle-class style”: William Labov. 1972. “The Social Stratification of (r) in New York City Department Stores.” Sociolinguistic Patterns. University of Pennsylvania Press. pp. 43–54.

  R-ful varieties are found: Peter Trudgill. 1984. Language in the British Isles. Cambridge University Press.

  It’s like how blue: Penelope Eckert. 2008. “Variation and the Indexical Field.” Journal of Sociolinguistics 12(4). pp. 453–476.

  “was quite insistent”: James Milroy. 1992. Linguistic Variation and Change: On the Historical Sociolinguistics of English. Blackwell. H. C. Wyld. 1927. A Short History of English. John Murray.

  “This is an Idiom which”: Robert Lowth. 1762. A Short Introduction to English Grammar. Digitized in 2006 via Oxford University.

  Communication tools that expose: Tim McGee and Patricia Ericsson. 2002. “The Politics of the Program: MS WORD as the Invisible Grammarian.” Computers and Composition 19. pp. 453–470.

  But spellchecks have tried: Lynne Murphy. 2018. The Prodigal Tongue: The Love-Hate Relationship between American and British English. Penguin. pp. 148–152.

  What I’ve seen from several editors: Anne Curzan. April 10, 2015. “Singular ‘They,’ Again.” The Chronicle of Higher Education: Lingua Franca. www.chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2015/04/10/singular-they-again. John E. McIntyre. April 10, 2015. “Singular “They”: The Editors’ Decision.” The Baltimore Sun. www.baltimoresun.com/news/language-blog/bal-singular-they-the-editors-decision-20150410-story.html. Personal communication with Benjamin Dreyer, chief copy editor, Random House; Peter Sokolowski, lexicographer, Merriam-Webster.

  subtle problems of bias: (No author cited.) (No date cited.) “Wikipedia: Systemic Bias.” Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Systemic_bias.

  Google Docs: Yew Jin Lim. March 21, 2012. “Spell Checking Powered by the Web.” Google Drive Blog. drive.googleblog.com/2012/03/spell-checking-powered-by-web.html.

  Textio: Kieran Snyder. November 11, 2016. “Want to Hire Faster? Write about ‘Learning,’ Not ‘Brilliance.’” Textio blog. textio.ai/growth-mindset-language-41d51c91432. Marissa Coughlin. October 18, 2017. “20 Benefits That Speed Up Hiring a
nd 5 That Slow It Down.” Textio blog. textio.ai/20-benefits-that-speed-up-hiring-and-5-that-slow-it-down-af266ce72ee8. Kieran Snyder. August 9, 2017. “Why AI Is Already Dead (and What’s Coming Next).” Textio blog. textio.ai/ai-and-ml-in-job-posts-67b24b2033f8.

  William Labov studied residents: William Labov. 1963. “The Social Motivation of a Sound Change.” Word 18. pp. 1–42.

  young men in Washington: Nicole R. Holliday. 2016. “Intonational Variation, Linguistic Style and the Black/Biracial Experience.” PhD dissertation, New York University.

  the speech patterns: Paul E. Reed. 2016. “Sounding Appalachian: /ai/ Monophthongization, Rising Pitch Accents, and Rootedness.” PhD dissertation, University of South Carolina.

  the speech of Jewish women: Rachel Burdin. 2016. “Variation in Form and Function in Jewish English Intonation.” PhD dissertation, Ohio State University.

  Research on youth language: Penelope Eckert. 2003. “Language and Adolescent Peer Groups.” Journal of Language and Social Psychology 22(1). pp. 112–118. Jennifer Florence Roth-Gordon. 2003. “Slang and the Struggle over Meaning: Race, Language, and Power in Brazil.” PhD dissertation, Stanford University. Vivienne Méla. 1997. “Verlan 2000.” Langue Française 114. pp. 16–34. Mary Bucholtz. 1999. “You Da Man: Narrating the Racial Other in the Production of White Masculinity.” Journal of Sociolinguistics 3(4). pp. 443–460. Cecilia A. Cutler. 1999. “Yorkville Crossing: White Teens, Hip Hop and African American English.” Journal of Sociolinguistics 3(4). pp. 428–441. Jane H. Hill. 1993. “Hasta la Vista, Baby: Anglo Spanish in the American Southwest.” Critique of Anthropology 13(2). pp. 145–176.