TFW, DamnGina, Juvie, and Hotsie-Totsie: On the Linguistic and Social Aspects of Internet Slang

Slang is ubiquitous on the Internet. The emergence of new social contexts like micro-blogs, question-answering forums, and social networks has enabled slang and non-standard expressions to abound on the web. Despite this, slang has been traditionally viewed as a form of non-standard language – a form of language that is not the focus of linguistic analysis and has largely been neglected. In this work, we use UrbanDictionary to conduct the first large scale linguistic analysis of slang and its social aspects on the Internet to yield insights into this variety of language that is increasingly used all over the world online. First, we begin by computationally analyzing the phonological, morphological and syntactic properties of slang in general. We then study linguistic patterns in four specific categories of slang namely alphabetisms, blends, clippings, and reduplicatives. Our analysis reveals that slang demonstrates extra-grammatical rules of phonological and morphological formation that markedly distinguish it from the standard form shedding insight into its generative patterns. Second, we follow up by analyzing the social aspects of slang where we study subject restriction and stereotyping in slang usage. Analyzing tens of thousands of such slang words reveals that the majority of slang on the Internet belongs to two major categories: sex and drugs. Further analysis reveals that not only does slang demonstrate prevalent gender and religious stereotypes but also an increased bias where even names of persons are associated with higher sexual prejudice than one might encounter in the standard form. In summary, our work suggests that slang exhibits linguistic properties and lexical innovation that strikingly distinguish it from the standard variety. Moreover, we note that not only is slang usage not immune to prevalent social biases and prejudices but also reflects such biases and stereotypes more intensely than the standard variety.