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Article published In: Internet Pragmatics
Vol. 6:1 (2023) ► pp.67–106

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“I am a real cat”

French-speaking cats on Twitter as an enregistered variety and community of practice

 | Leipzig University
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Open Access publication of this article was funded through a Transformative Agreement with Leipzig University.

Published online: 11 July 2022
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https://doi.org/10.1075/ip.00083.tru
Abstract
This paper is an exploration of the variety of French-speaking cats on Twitter. Among the many creative phenomena that the internet has produced, animal-related language varieties, the language used by pets, have been explored as early as the 2000s, yet with a strong and almost exclusive focus on English. I first describe the shared repertoire of lexical, semantic, phonographic, and syntactic features used by French-speaking cats, and show how the simultaneous use of a childlike code and a formal register constructs the sociolinguistic persona of cats as ambivalent animals. I argue that the French variety has become “enregistered” (Squires, Lauren. 2010. “Enregistering internet language.” Language in Society 39(4): 457–492. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar) insofar as it is perceived and ideologically constructed as a variety of its own while promoting a welcoming culture towards new members. In doing so, cats show that the belonging to a community of practice, notably by drawing on a common repertoire of resources, does not need to be linked with processes of exclusion.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction: Francophone cats online
  • 2.Cat-related language varieties until now
  • 3.Typical features of English-speaking cats
  • 4.Investigating cats online: The corpus
    • 4.1How it all began
    • 4.2Sütterlin Scat Katz: The established member at the core of the community
    • 4.3A structured network of interrelated accounts
    • 4.4Data selection and researcher’s involvement with the online community
  • 5.Constructing an ambivalent sociolinguistic persona: Cats as arrogant yet needy pets
    • 5.1Recurring topics: More than snapshots of the cats’ daily lives
    • 5.2Lexical features: Euphemisms, exaggerations, and wordplays
    • 5.3The semantic field of personal relations: Childlike politeness and obsequiosity
    • 5.4Phonographic features: Between sociolect and language acquisition
    • 5.5Syntactic features: A mix-and-match
  • 6.Constituting a community of practice: Towards the enregisterment of the variety
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
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