Some dogs are doggos, some are puppers, and others may even be pupperinos. There are corgos and clouds, fluffers and floofs, woofers and boofers. The chunky ones are thicc, and the thin ones are long bois. When they stick out their tongues, they're doing a mlem, a blep, a blop. They bork. They boof. Once in a while they do each other a frighten. And whether they're 10/10 or 12/10, they're all h*ckin' good boys and girls.
Are you picking up what I'm putting down? If not, you're probably not fluent in DoggoLingo, a language trend that's been gaining steam on the Internet in the past few years. The language most often accompanies a picture or a video of a dog and has spread to all major forms of social media. It might even change the way we talk out loud to our beloved canines.
DoggoLingo, sometimes referred to as doggo-speak, "seems to be quite lexical, there are a lot of distinctive words that are used," says Internet linguist Gretchen McCulloch. "It's cutesier than others, too. Doggo, woofer, pupper, pupperino, fluffer — those have all got an extra suffix on the end to make them cuter."
McCulloch also notes DoggoLingo is uniquely heavy on onomatopoeias like bork, blep, mlem and blop.
Are you picking up what I'm putting down? If not, you're probably not fluent in DoggoLingo, a language trend that's been gaining steam on the Internet in the past few years. The language most often accompanies a picture or a video of a dog and has spread to all major forms of social media. It might even change the way we talk out loud to our beloved canines.
DoggoLingo, sometimes referred to as doggo-speak, "seems to be quite lexical, there are a lot of distinctive words that are used," says Internet linguist Gretchen McCulloch. "It's cutesier than others, too. Doggo, woofer, pupper, pupperino, fluffer — those have all got an extra suffix on the end to make them cuter."
McCulloch also notes DoggoLingo is uniquely heavy on onomatopoeias like bork, blep, mlem and blop.
It's no surprise DoggoLingo is made up of cutesy suffixes and onomatopoeias. "You're taking on characteristics of how people would address their animals in the first place," McCulloch says.
What's more, DoggoLingo is spoken by humans online, as opposed to in memes like LOLcats, doge and snek where the animals themselves do the talking. This makes DoggoLingo much more accessible, McCulloch notes, and perhaps more likely to find its way into spoken human speech.
It wouldn't be surprising if people started to call their Samoyeds fluffers, point out a Labrador's mlem or call an overweight pug a fat boi, as in this Facebook post. In fact, they're probably saying these out loud already.
"A new cutesy word for a thing you're already used to using cutesy words for? That's such an easy entry to vocabulary," McCulloch says.
A menagerie of meme-speak
DoggoLingo's array of words is a hodgepodge of existing Internet language.
For example, the phrase "doing me a frighten," used to describe startled dogs, comes from an image posted in late 2015 according to KnowYourMeme.com. In it, a tiny Rottweiler puppy shocks its parent with a flurry of borks. The parent replies, "stop it son, you are doing me a frighten."
The origin of "bork" itself is less clear, but it's clearly onomatopoeic. It's perhaps most well-known thanks to Gabe the Dog, a tiny floof of a Miniature American Eskimo/Pomeranian whose borks have been remixed into countless classic tunes. Jurassic Bork, The Bork Files, Doggos of the Borkribbean, Imperial Borks — the list goes on and on.
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