Cat-related Keywords

A Wordlist for Linguistic Material

For my analysis of cat-related linguistic data, I compiled a list of keywords to look for. This approach is similar to the surveys in dialectology for which we use a questionnaire to study how specific language features occur in the various regions – if our aim is to study regional variation.

What I am actually doing is to check out which forms of these keywords occur and list these various forms. Then I look for possible patterns that I can detect .

I may also find other interesting language forms that are not part of the list. In dialectology, we call the material we did not look for ‘Incidental Material’. Fieldwork for the SED (Survey of English Dialects), by the way, found vast amounts of ‘Incidental Material’.

Feel free to download and use the list of keywords. Please refer to my book “Purrieties of Language: How We Talk about Cats Online when you use the list.