One example that's really intriguing can be seen on one of the world's funniest websites, www.icanhascheezburger.com. The photos themselves are funny, and the captions are generally hilarious, but the key to the humor is the use of a written dialect that's evolved rapidly. I've heard it called "Ingrish" but it's generally known as "lolspeak" or "kittehspeak". One of the major components of lolspeak is that it misspells or shortens words frequently. Other facets like distinctive syntax and verb tense are characteristic as well.
But thanks to a group of regular participants, the dialect's gone way beyond the nuts & bolts of language, developing referential slang, sayings/proverbs, and both spoken and unspoken rules. The website even offers different resources like a dictionary and usage guidelines.
Others will advise as "noobies" begin to join the culture. A great example is a response from regular poster "Turkeyburger", to a criticism of this photo caption from a new fan. The noobie suggested that the top line was redundant given the look on the cat's face.Turkeyburger replied, "Redundancy is a fairly large part of teh lolspeak funneh. A fairly regular style of capping a pic like this one would be simply to state
“Serious Cat…is serious.”
It is just that intentional stating of the obvious, and for that matter, repeating it that makes up a large percentage of the humor.
After all, frequently the point is to write what we feel a cat would be saying in a given pic, and let’s be blunt here–I think most of us would agree that cats generally don’t have brains (or at least common sense) in bukkitfulls. I’m not trying to put them down, but we are talking about a creature that finds the inside of shoes obsessively fascinating, will run back into a dangerous situation that it just had to be rescued from, and willfully eats moths and spiders. There are many people who would not consider those to be redeeming qualities in a pet. Then there are the rest of us."*
Even during instruction, humor is the focus of the culture, which makes it both a remarkable stress relief for its addicts (and I am among them), and a generally friendly and welcoming community to all who want in on teh funneh and love animals.
It's not often you get to see language evolve right before your eyes. At first, I just found it all quite funny, but then I started noticing how complex and surprisingly formalized the language was. Some deplore lolspeak as a degradation of language, but hearken back to Shakespearean dramas or Elizabethan novels, and the lengthy paragraphs in which people spoke using rather more words than was really necessary and constructing grammatically elaborate sentences. Ahem. See? That barely approached the standards of formal language of a few hundred years ago, but in today's world, it's a run-on sentence.
Language is always going to evolve. As long as culture keeps evolving (which it will, as long as there are people alive on the earth), its Siamese twin, language, will continue to change as well. The two are inextricably intertwined, reflecting each other in interesting ways, revealing nuances about the subculture that a dialect serves.
If they'd read closely, the naysayers would realize they need not fear the world going to hell in a handbasket - at least, not because of ICHC... The regular posters are all highly literate and include a massive variety of music, movie and literary references in their comments. Many will step out of kittehspeak to share a serious thought or one that's complex enough to be difficult to boil down into lingo. Like the several thousand other dialects in English, lolspeak can exist side by side with it; in fact, understanding the formalities of English is essential to getting much of the humor, with lolspeak playing off the formal rules to maximize its humor.
Not to suck all the fun out of it, of course. In lolspeak, "Im on ur intrnet, analyzn ur dyalekt. Iz sillee but kewl. Kthxbai."
* Source: http://icanhascheezburger.com/2007/07/19/i-are-serious-cat/#comments
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