Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language

By :Gretchen McCulloch

“Gretchen McCulloch is the internet’s favorite linguist, and this book is essential reading. Reading her work is like suddenly being able to see the matrix.” —Jonny Sun, author of everyone's a aliebn when ur a aliebn too  






Source : Amazon & Vox
https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/8/2/20750773/because-internet-review-gretchen-mcculloch-linguistics

Information :

Language is humanity's most spectacular open-source project, and the internet is making our language change faster and in more interesting ways than ever before. Internet conversations are structured by the shape of our apps and platforms, from the grammar of status updates to the protocols of comments and @replies. Linguistically inventive online communities spread new slang and jargon with dizzying speed. What's more, social media is a vast laboratory of unedited, unfiltered words where we can watch language evolve in real time.


The internet has fundamentally changed the way we communicate with each other. It has given us GIFs, memes, emoji, and more initialisms than anyone can count — and in the process, it’s created a whole new set of norms for informal writing.

In her new book Because Internet, linguist Gretchen McCulloch unpacks those norms one by one. She delves deeply into the corpus of internet speech to figure out the patterns in the way we write to one another online: what we really mean when we type “lol,” why periods seem so passive-aggressive in texts, and why emoji became so popular so fast.

McCulloch isn’t a prescriptivist, and she has no interest in telling her readers that one particular way of using language is more correct than others. Instead, she tracks how people are really communicating right now, and what meaning they are conveying to each other with their particular choice of capitalization style and GIF. What makes Because Internet so compelling is that McCulloch can parse the subconscious choices we all make every day as we type, and explain exactly how we learned to make those choices in the first place.

Here are the seven most interesting things we learned about internet language from Because Internet -

1. The keyboard smash has patterns.
2. Spellcheck actually changed spelling.
3. The first internet slang dictionary predates the internet.
4. There are many layers to the humble “lol”
5. There is an explanation for why older people fill their texts with ellipses.
6. The spoken hashtag is just the latest punctuation mark to make the jump from writing to speech.
7. Emoji aren’t a new language. They’re a new way to gesture.

And those emoji are just one part of the way we talk on the internet now, and of the new, flexible, and ever-evolving way we do language online — the new ways we’re finding to communicate with each other more effectively than ever.