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About

Wicht, Purr Reviewer 2

Meowza evfuryone. Here’s to Furensic Linguistics

Welcome to The Meow Factor, my linguistics research blog. I am a Furensic Linguist studying how we speak as our cats on social media. But don’t get too excited because “furensic linguistics” does not really exist in linguistics and it is not a subject you can specialise in at university. What you can study, though, is linguistics.

I did linguistics at university because dialects have always fascinated me. All the different accents and words and grammar – languages can’t get better than that. So doing dialectology at university was like a given for me. And coupled with a fascination for the English language, my PhD on a Welsh English dialect was the obvious choice for me.

Cats with no rats in sight

No cats, no me. It’s as simple as that. Maybe because I have always been a cat lady and not a rat lady and there was no way I could successfully compete in the academic rat race, I decided to go my own way in my research as an independent scholar outside my day job.

I can still remember the moment when “furensic linguistics” came into existence; actually there were two moments: One was my discovery of Grumpy Cat on Facebook in a political meme, and the second was a cat used as clickbait by a university library. And so I launched The Meow Factor blog.

And now many years later, I have written several scientific publications on cats in the public sphere – with my book “Purrieties of Language: How We Talk about Cats Online” as the most comprehensive. For all my research publications, please see my ORCID-ID.

Credits

Editor: Edith Podhovnik

Editorial Team: Purr Reviewer 1 and Purr Reviewer 2

Spokescat: Murrli (went over the rainbow bridge in 2019), see DediCATion to Spokes-cat

Edith Podhovnik | University of Applied Sciences FH Joanneum |Alte Poststraße 152 | 8020 Graz | Austria

Logo: The logo comes from http://freedesignfile.com/22693-funny-black-cat-design-vector-02/ and is used under the Creative Commons License 3.0.