I recently received word that an article I wrote was accepted for (peer reviewed) publication in the book English in Computer Mediated Communication, edited by Lauren Squires, and published by De Gruyter. I'm very excited to be included, and the book is going to be extremely interesting, with chapters on things like the social meaning of Scottish accents on Youtube, and word formation in Cyberpunk discussions, marginalized voices in The World of Warcraft, and stylistic variation on and off screen among Real Housewives, among other topics. You can pre-order the book here.

My chapter is called Tweets as Graffiti, and in it, I argue that we can learn a lot about how people actually speak from how they write on social media. More importantly, I argue that how people write on social media is not terribly different from how people have always written, especially when it's informal writing, and especially when the writing system doesn't well represent the sounds of the language.

The main thrust of my argument is that Historical linguists have long had the tools to analyze text for clues about sound, and that we can just as easily apply those tools to tweets as to graffiti. I explicitly compare Vulgar Latin graffiti and African American English on Twitter to look at the written representations of speech, but I could have just as easily compared Attic Greek and French tweets, or Middle English and Zulu tweets (now's a good time to mention the best Middle English-y twitter feed ever, Chaucer Doth Tweet).

I first summarize how we know what we know about Vulgar Latin pronunciation, which is interesting in its own right. In the article, I discuss the obvious things: puns, rhymes and meter, borrowings into and from other languages (and how things get spelled), but I also discuss Roman grammar snobs (great band name) misheard prophecy (great band name), dirty puns on the senate floor, medieval scribal shenanigans, and that one time Cicero accidentally said landicam ("clitoris"). Did I mention you can pre-order the book?

Then I point out that things we assume are super modern and totally the fault of "computers" "cell phones" and "kids these days" are totally...not. Rebus spelling ("C U L8r!")? Yeah, Pompeiians were doing that 2,000 years ago, with things like <krus> for the name Carus. In fact, in recent talks I gave at U Penn and at Gettysburg College, I played a game with the audience that I like to call Social Media or Pompeiian Graffiti? Think it sounds easy?

Instagram or Pompeiian Graffiti? "[April 19th] I made bread!"

Yelp or Pompeiian Graffiti? "Two friends dined here and had terrible service."

Twitter or Pompeiian Graffiti? "If you stick your dick in fire, you're gonna get burned."

Yelp or Pompeiian Graffiti? "The food here is poison."

Which of those were bad Yelp reviews and which were graffiti? Not so easy (spoiler: they were all Pompeiian graffiti. Further, different kind of spoiler: given where it was found [a bathroom stall], the "bread" one might have actually been about a turd.).

Finally, I apply the same tools to basilectal (~ "divergent") AAE tweets. Elsewhere, I've discussed Imagined Black English, and that sometimes it's hard for people who don't know AAE to fully get the nuance of the way some words are used. What I'm talking about here is not that. I'm talking about tweets like:

he fahn dinnamug

ioneem b doin nun!

If you speak or understand AAE fluently, your response to the first might be "sholl is," and if you don't, you're probably scratching your head trying to figure out what it could possibly mean (hint: dishware is not involved. The <g> in <mug?> is not usually pronounced, or even always written with a <g>). I'll have an explanation at the bottom for those readers. The point is, these are very divergent from classroom spelling, but they more clearly communicate both spoken pronunciation, and something about the person doing the "speaking." In the chapter, I then go through two case studies, one on what linguists call liquids (/r/ and /l/), which frequently disappear or change in AAE, and one on the glottal stop (the sound in the middle of "uh-oh"), which is used in different places in AAE. For both, I give detailed descriptions of what happens in speech, and what happens in informal writing.

The thing is, like I wrote above, the same tools are applicable to a variety of different languages. The way historical linguists make hypotheses about pronunciation, and then rigorously check them against many different types of sources are just as applicable to modern languages as to ancient ones. And the fact that people make spelling mistakes based on "sounding it out" or, more importantly, intentionally "misspell" things for effect means that we can use social media to do the same kinds of things as historical linguists: we can make and assess hypotheses about how people speak. The only difference is that we have the added benefit of being able to corroborate it, since not all the speakers are dead. Take that, historical linguistics.

So, rather than rehash what's in the chapter, I'm going to demonstrate the approach I argue for, drawing on Scots English, French, and Zulu.