Meow the 74th – The Purrification of English (Publication)

The Purrification of English: Meowlogisms in Online Communities: A qualitative description of a selected #blackcat community on Instagram’ has now been published as by the journal English Today of Cambridge University Press.

The paper ‘The Purrification of English: Meowlogisms in Online Communities’ looks at how the trend of internet cats has influenced the English language used online. In particular, the aim of the paper is to show the variety of so-called meowlogisms in a selected #blackcat online community on Instagram. In a non-random sample, posts from three cat accounts of the #blackcat community of a one-month period have been selected. Captions and comments from 97 posts have been collected and analysed qualitatively with a QDA software. An additional analysis of 79 news articles on cats from four British online media has been conducted. The results show that meowlogisms are formed by substituting part of the word with the cat-specific words ‘cat, meow, purr, fur, paw, hiss’, and ‘claw’ and by using cat-speak in both social media and online media. Meowlogisms, specific hashtags, and emoticons are identification markers of the selected #blackcat community on Instagram.

The full paper is available here.