madmaudlingoes:

prismatic-bell:

atomicairspace:

copperbooms:

when did tumblr collectively decide not to use punctuation like when did this happen why is this a thing

it just looks so smooth I mean look at this sentence flow like a jungle river

ACTUALLY

This is really exciting, linguistically speaking.

Because it’s not true that Tumblr never uses punctuation. But it is true that lack of punctuation has become, itself, a form of punctuation. On Tumblr the lack of punctuation in multisentence-long posts creates the function of rhetorical speech, or speech that is not intended to have an answer, usually in the form of a question. Consider the following two potential posts. Each individual line should be taken as a post:

ugh is there any particular reason people at work have to take these massive handfuls of sauce packets they know they’re not going to use like god put that back we have to pay for that stuff

Ugh. Is there any particular reason people at work have to take these massive handfuls of sauce packets they know they’re not going to use? Like god, put that back. We have to pay for that stuff.

In your head, those two potential posts sound totally different. In the first one I’m ranting about work, and this requires no answer. The second may actually engage you to give an answer about hoarding sauce packets. And if you answer the first post, you will likely do so in the same style. 

Here’s what makes this exciting: the English language has no actual punctuation for rhetorical speech–that is, there are no special marks that specifically indicate “this speech is in the abstract, and requires no answer.” Not only that, it never has. The first written record of English (actually proto-English, predating even Old English) dates to the 400s CE, so we’re talking about 1600 years of having absolutely no marker whatsoever for rhetorical speech.

A group of teens and young adults on a blogging website literally reshaped a deficit a millennium and a half old in our language to fit their language needs. More! This group has agreed on a more or less universal standard for these new rules, which fits the definition of “language.” Which is to say Tumblr English is its own actual, real, separate dialect of the English language, and because it is spoken by people worldwide who have introduced concepts from their own languages into it, it may qualify as a written form of pidgin. 

Tumblr English should literally be treated as its own language, because it does not follow the rules of any form of formal written English, and yet it does have its own consistent internal rules. If you don’t think that’s cool as fuck then I don’t even know what to tell you.

(Just so you know I did check the replies on this to make sure I’m not dogpiling on the OP. Conclusion: Tumblr is full of assholes, but we knew this already.)

Prismatic-Bell is headed in the right direction but overstating her case a bit. To be clear, let’s do some definitional gerrymandering:

• a language is a set of rule-goverened, internally consistent, and mutually intelligible codes;
• a dialect is a code or set of codes within a language that is linked to a particular geographic region, ethnic group, social class, etc. (may also be called ethnolect, sociolect, genderlect, or whatever for clarity.)
• a register is a code, or a set of features within a code, that can be used for specific rhetorical or indexical effect. 
• code-switching, code-shifting, style-shifting, and about eight hundred other terms all refer to the ability of individual speakers to change from one code to another, on the fly, tuning their communication to a particular audience and purpose. Multilinguals may code-switch between languages, multi-dialectal speakers may switch between dialects, and everybody switches between registers because, as socially competent language users, we all command at least a few different ways of speaking even if we only speak “one language.”

“Tumblrian” is a register, not a dialect or a language. It’s defined by features like the ones flagged above – which are common in “netspeak” in general, because increasingly we’re using writing (text messages, social media) to do things that have primarily been done with speech.

Or, rather, most of the things we’ve historically done with writing – and most of the things we’re taught to do with writing – have been formal, businesslike, prestigious. There are plenty of exceptions to be found (medieval monks used abbreviations not unlike the ones we used in early-2000s texting; people have always written personal letters and diaries however the fuck they wanted; Norma Mendoza-Denton has researched the poetry books shared by Chicana high schoolers in the early ‘90s) but, one, we usually aren’t taught about those registers of writing when we’re learning to write “for real”; and two, those registers were used in relatively small groups of people.

What’s unique about the way we’re using writing now is that we’re now using it casually and on a large scale, thanks to social media. So not only are we freely playing around with the constraints of the medium (punctuation, capitalization, variant spellings, emoji and smilies) but we have large groups of people using these new registers in highly visible ways. So a particular way of using the written word can become conventionalized–dare I say enregistered–for a wide community of users.

The tl;dr summary:

• Tumblrian is a style or register, not a language
• writing has been democratized
• language socialization is cool
• people on tumblr can be assholes.