#because it's parenthatical to the main post!

[stormandmoonlight]

my Master's degree involved looking specifically at Tumblr and a part of my analysis included Tumblr vernacular English as a specific point of analysis (god I wish I'd looked into it more specifically, but there are other people out there who would do it better than I). It's genuinely really cool to track the evolution of the vernacular and, interestingly, a group of native speakers. The "dialect with specific tone markers in written form" was actually salient to my study, which was looking at autistic people and how they use social media sites as loci of community building (oh god I relied too much on Boellstorff for my grounding research my heart breaks at my foolishness) and part of what made Tumblr so useful as a community site for autistic folks was that specificity and clarity in the emergent dialect. Tone markers, specific forms of writing that signify different ways of speaking, the blending of text and image media (insert Supernatural pic here), and a whole bunch more things help contribute to making casual speech no less complex but more clear and understandable to the user. shit's so fkn cool, y'all.

the most disorienting thing thats ever happened to me was when a linguistics major stopped in the middle of our conversation, looked me in the eye, and said, "you have a very interesting vernacular. were you on tumblr in 2014?" and i had to just stand there and process that one for a good ten seconds