NinjaMuse's Reviews > Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language

In brief: A linguist looks at the ways the internet has changed English, with digressions into internet culture as a whole.

Full disclosure: This was a reading copy which I received through work, with the expectation that I would like it enough to review it and then order it for stock. This book is out July 23, 2019.

Thoughts: This was a really interesting read, containing a lot of stuff I knew without knowing and also stuff I hadn’t thought about. It’s also a good, well-structured introduction to linguistics and specifically sociolinguistics—not as in depth as a textbook would be, but with compressed versions of the core ideas in accessible, modern language. I liked that McCulloch makes a point to not only lay out her reasoning as to why she focused on some linguistic features over others, but also to cite originators of memes and slang when possible.

As for the contents, they’re a little hard to sum up simply because there’s a lot of stuff covered. The evolution of internet culture and generational profiles of its users. The semantic uses of gifs and emojis. Twitter and Facebook as research tools. Minimalist Tumblr punctuation and the contentiousness of periods in texts. The history of memes. The informality of emails compared to letters. Emphatic letter duplication. Just for starters. Like I said, I knew a lot of the content just from living on the internet for so long, but it was nice having it verbalized and the sociology I largely did not know and it was very cool.

And while McCulloch doesn’t cover everything—the “because + noun phrase” formation doesn’t appear despite the title, for instance, and the spread of internet usages into spoken English is barely touched on—a lot of those gaps are things you could do a dissertation on and internet linguistics is a pretty new field, so I have hopes for either a follow-up or a book by somebody else. She definitely leaves things open and encouraging to anyone wanting to follow her lead. (Doing linguistics research and stumped for ideas? Hit me up. I have thoughts.)

So yeah, definitely a good book and very much written for me the internet goblin linguistics nerd. Anyone who’s interested in language, the internet, understanding what the heck is up with kids these days, and/or the social history of our times should add this to their TBR.

8/10

To bear in mind: Will challenge your ideas about language and the internet, unless you’re a linguist already. If you’re already a linguist, will give you at least ten ideas for research papers. Might also give you flashbacks to the 1990s, regardless of educational leanings.