Thread by @BerLinguistin

#linguistweets #lt1515 Today we’re talking about a new phenomenon on the Francophone Twittersphere: people behind Twitter accounts of cats talking like a cat, as if they were a cat. For English, we know it as Lolspeak/Kitty Pidgin: it’s a Special Internet Language Variety. 1/

Anglophone cats are known for their baby voice + specific ortho, gramm & lex features. Francophone cats combine a childlike code AND a formal register. Both features create the sociolinguistic persona of cats as ambivalent animals… who made it into the newspaper! (trad: ALT) 2/

I explored 100 Twitter accounts of cats. My hypothesis was that very few, pivotal accounts are leading sociolinguistic change and the dissemination of pragmatic and sociolinguistic norms of use—one of them being @SutterlinKatz, self-established & recognized as such (trad: ALT) 3/

Cats display a rich interplay of lexical features, but very few are used ONLY by cats:
- euphemisms: la grande sieste (‘the big nap’ = the death)
- formal register: prédater (‘predate’), prestance (‘stature’), outré / scandaloutrage (‘outraged’), even used as a #Hashtag 4/

Typical for cats is fake politeness, graphematic variation around phonetic elision & ‘that’-constructions that become so salient that new accounts adopt only THIS feature to become part of the community and not the full range of features + not in the same syntactic position 5/

Conclusion: not an artificial or constructed language (as some Tweeps say) but a sociolinguistic style (as @SutterlinKatz argues).

This study shows how people integrate to digital networks by adopting the (perceived) norms of core members of the community of practice 6/6

(I'm not sure if I'm allowed, but I posted a very blurred screenshot (was okay on my phone but not so much on my laptop...), so I'm adding the same one below.)

And here there is a mistake on the first picture... 😰😬 I meant that ‘que’ (‘that’) can be read as a possible elision of ‘parce que’ (‘because’), while on the second one ‘que’ does not play this role... Not sure if anyone spotted it but this kind of frustrates me right now 😳

This #linguistweets thread is getting far more attention than I would have ever have suspected (thank you), so if you’re...

- a cat & want to share *anything* with me
- a linguist working on the syntax of ‘que’ in French
- a scholar working on Lolspeak

... please write me! 🤩