DoggoLingo is an Internet language that is created from word conversion,

meme A meme ( ) is an idea, behavior, or style that spreads by means of imitation from person to person within a culture and often carries symbolic meaning representing a particular phenomenon or theme. A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ...

lexicon A lexicon is the vocabulary of a language or branch of knowledge (such as nautical or medical). In linguistics, a lexicon is a language's inventory of lexemes. The word ''lexicon'' derives from Greek word (), neuter of () meaning 'of or fo ...

, and

onomatopoeia Onomatopoeia is the process of creating a word that phonetically imitates, resembles, or suggests the sound that it describes. Such a word itself is also called an onomatopoeia. Common onomatopoeias include animal noises such as ''oink'', ''m ...

. Emerging in the 2010s, DoggoLingo is implied to be a dog's own

idiom An idiom is a phrase or expression that typically presents a figurative, non-literal meaning attached to the phrase; but some phrases become figurative idioms while retaining the literal meaning of the phrase. Categorized as formulaic language ...

, and is presented as what humans have long believed goes on in the canine brain. Elyse Graham, assistant professor at

Stony Brook University Stony Brook University (SBU), officially the State University of New York at Stony Brook, is a public research university in Stony Brook, New York. Along with the University at Buffalo, it is one of the State University of New York system' ...

, describes DoggoLingo as "upbeat, joyful, and clueless in a relentlessly friendly way".

Structure

DoggoLingo appends various diminutive suffixes "-o", "-er", "-ino" to existing English words (e.g. ''dog'' turns into ''doggo'', ''pup'' turns into ''pupper'') as well as DoggoLingo words that have been created (e.g. ''pupper'' turns into ''pupperino'', ''bork'' turns into ''borker''). DoggoLingo relies heavily upon onomatopoeia: Words such as ''blep'', ''blop'', ''gwelp'' and ''mlem'' describe the action of a dog sticking out its tongue, or other forms of facial expression; ''bork'', ''boof'', ''woof'' describe the various canine barking sounds. A dog with a fluffy coat may be called a ''floof'' or a ''fluff''. DoggoLingo follows a similar rudimentary style to create its verbs (e.g. ''doin me a'' in place of present participles with the speaker as object, such as ''doin me a scare'' "scaring me") and adjectives (e.g. ''heckin'' in place of degree modifiers such as ''extremely''). 'Heck' is frequently used in place of more conventional expletives. Some words also come from eye dialect spellings of English words, such as ''fren'' "friend".

Origin

DoggoLingo emerged in the 2010s, but its exact origin is unknown. Various social media accounts such as

WeRateDogs WeRateDogs is a Twitter account that rates people's dogs with a humorous comment about the dog. The account was started in 2015 by college student Matt Nelson, and has received international media attention both for its popularity and for the atte ...

on Twitter and Dogspotting on Facebook, as well as social news aggregation and

imageboard An imageboard is a type of Internet forum that focuses on the posting of images, often alongside text and discussion. The first imageboards were created in Japan as an extension of the textboard concept. These sites later inspired the creation of ...

websites like

4chan 4chan is an anonymous English-language imageboard website. Launched by Christopher "moot" Poole in October 2003, the site hosts boards dedicated to a wide variety of topics, from anime and manga to video games, cooking, weapons, television, ...

Reddit Reddit (; stylized in all lowercase as reddit) is an American social news aggregation, content rating, and discussion website. Registered users (commonly referred to as "Redditors") submit content to the site such as links, text posts, imag ...

, or

Tumblr Tumblr (stylized as tumblr; pronounced "tumbler") is an American microblogging and social networking website founded by David Karp in 2007 and currently owned by Automattic. The service allows users to post multimedia and other content to ...

have aided in popularizing the use of DoggoLingo by consistently using or hosting content that uses the lingo on their Internet pages. In 2014, the Dogspotting Facebook account gained popularity, especially in Australia where coincidentally adding "-o" to the end of words is also a feature of Australian slang. Usage of DoggoLingo peaked around 2017. Linguist

Gretchen McCulloch Gretchen McCulloch () is a Canadian linguist. On her blog, as well as her podcast Lingthusiasm (which she cohosts with Lauren Gawne) she offers linguistic analysis of online communication such as internet memes, emoji and instant messaging. She ...

characterized the language as "taking on characteristics of how people would address their animals in the first place", and noted that it was used by people talking as themselves online, in contrast to the mid-2000s

lolcat A lolcat (pronounced ), or LOLcat, is an image macro of one or more cats. Lolcat images' idiosyncratic and intentionally grammatically incorrect text is known as lolspeak. Lolcat is a compound word of the acronymic abbreviation LOL (laug ...

trend where images of cats were captioned as if the cat were speaking.

Examples

Other animals

Many other animals are referred to differently in DoggoLingo: for example, one would refer to a snake as ''snek'' or ''danger noodle'', a human being as ''hooman'', a cat as ''catto'' (cf. ''doggo''), a bird as ''birb'', and a bee as a ''spicy sky raisin''.

References

Note

Citations

{{Internet Dialects Internet memes Internet slang Dogs in popular culture 2010s fads and trends