Fluently Improper

(This post'll be short, as I'm having a Firefly marathon with a friend today and don't have much time to write.)

Like most people who speak more than one language, I sometimes tend to slip between the two. There's a lot of Spanish spoken in the desert where I live, and some people may start a conversation in English and end it in their home tongue. I don't know Spanish, and while I've been taking French long enough to break into it when writing notes to myself, the language I find myself slipping into in common writing and speaking is a fairly new one: Lolspeak.

 

 Lolspeak, if you didn't know, is an internet sub-language, derived from a simplified English in which words are generally misspelled, completely phonetic, or purposely written how one might accidentally type them. It's different from text-speak (or txtspeak) which is used solely to cut down the number of characters used in a message (to fit the general 160 character text limit). Lolspeak isn't meant to make communication faster or easier - in fact, it generally takes longer to type a message in Lolspeak, and then translate it to English to understand. Lolspeak, as a fluent speaker might explain, is spoken "for the lulz"

('Lolz', derived from 'LOLs', a plural acronym of "Laugh out Loud." 'For the lulz', in a common English phrase, is 'for the fun of it', or 'for kicks and giggles'.)

I've been on the internet for a long time now, so I've become quite fluent in Lolspeak. And as I stated, anyone fluent in a language might slip into on accident. As highly as I esteem my mother tongue, I'll find myself writing and even saying 'teh' sometimes when I mean 'the', and referring to common singular nouns in the plural, as is abundant in Lolspeak (which talks of 'teh interwebs' often). I verb my nouns and noun my adverbs, cut or shift letters, and I have to force myself to write 'like' instead of 'lyke' the few times I get a chance to use the word.

Some people may say that Lolspeak is a diminished form of English - and it's partly true. But fluent Lolspeak speakers, I've found, have a stronger grasp on phonics as a necessity. No research has been done - because srsly, how's a grad student going to get funding for this? - but I suspect they also have a higher grasp of the English language, and an easier time learning other languages too. While Lolspeak may use a simplified vocabulary, like the Orwellian Newspeak that it's named after, the grammar structure and spelling rules (which are, in fact, rules and not suggestions) are pretty complicated.

I'm not sure if I exactly condone the learning of Lolspeak. It helps when communicating with the younger generation, to know the vernacular they use, but there are probably long term repercussions. I dislike the literary idea that English is perfect, and we should stop messing with it, because English only got to be the way it is today by constant messings-with over hundreds of years. It's a fluid language, and while that makes older writings harder to read, it also makes them a delight.

If you want to know more about Lolspeak, visit www.speaklolspeak.com.