A Linguist Explains the Grammar of Doge. Wow.

by Gretchen McCulloch · February 6, 2014

Gretchen McCulloch last explained exactly how the Benedict Cumberbatch name generator works.

If you spend time on the meme-ish corners of the internet, you’ve probably noticed a certain trend in captioning pictures of shiba inus, known as doge, although there’s considerable disagreement about how to pronounce the word itself.

In case you haven’t (which isn’t possible), here are some prototypical examples of the doge meme. For more doge than you can probably handle, see also the tumblr tag:

tumblr_mwpy4x8SlN1sfvmr7o1_1280

tumblr_mvp8vmvYeF1r65thuo3_500

imNhboK

You’ll notice that unlike the LOLcats of yesteryear (which have actually had a thesis and an academic paper written about them), the font choice is Comic Sans instead of Impact, multiple fluorescent colours instead of white with a black border, and all lowercase instead of all caps. Spelling overall is quite standard, which is very different from classic internet memes (more on this later).

Although the meme started with words on top of a picture of a shiba inu, and this is still the form that’s been commented on by linguists, io9, and knowyourmeme alike, doge speak has become famous enough that it’s recognizable when it violates these constraints. For example, here’s doge paired with other memes like grumpy cat or moon moon:

tumblr_inline_mw1116jz1i1qizrkf

jvyf5WC

In fact, you don’t even need a picture of a shiba inu. Here’s doge speak on a portrait of the hereditary ruler of Venice (a position that has been known as doge, a variant of duke, since the Middle Ages). I’m almost definitely sure that the internet wasn’t a thing during the Middle Ages.

tumblr_mvdqs0CLnw1rhcn5oo1_500

But what really interests me as a linguist is that doge speak is recognizably doge even when it’s not on an image at all. Let’s take a look at a particularly brilliant example from tumblr, although there are many shorter ones (check out this twitter or this subreddit):

What light. So breaks. Such east. Very sun. Wow, Juliet.
What Romeo. Such why. Very rose. Still rose.
Very balcony. Such climb.
Much love. So Propose. Wow, marriage.
Very Tybalt. Much stab. What do?
Such exile. Very Mantua. Much sad.
So, priest? Much sleeping. Wow, tomb.
Such poison. What dagger. Very dead. Wow, end.

In typical tumblr-collaborative fashion, this was written by a different author per line, a full list of which can be found here, but which I omit for ease of reading. It’s recognizably doge, but there’s nary a shiba nor a fluorescent font in sight. Various creative people on the internet have also come up with forms of doge that riff on different aspects of it, such as doge script (based on javascript), dogecoin (based on bitcoin), dogegit or this YouTube easter egg.

So if it’s not the shiba inu or the fluorescent comic sans that makes a text doge, then what is it?

I’m so glad you asked. Let’s put our linguist hats on and get ready to analyze.

Doge speak is clearly composed of subunits which are divided by a period in running text, which I’m going to call doge phrases. The period is optional in images, but in that case the phrases are scattered artistically around the picture. Here are some examples of doge phrases:

  • such drift
  • much dignity
  • very leeder
  • many robe
  • much infinity
  • so gif
  • very guitar
  • such fall
  • so trick
  • much feels
  • very sad
  • many happy
  • such pbs
  • very art

There are also a smaller number of single-word doge phrases, chiefly:

  • wow
  • amaze
  • excite

A minimal doge utterance contains at least two but often three 2-word doge phrases, followed by a single-word doge phrase (most commonly wow). Additional phrases and variants can be added, especially for the sake of cultural references, such as can’t believe it’s not doge or dogeway to heaven but they are not what makes an utterance recognizably doge.

What makes a recognizable doge phrase?

I’m going to ignore the single-word phrases, because that’s essentially a list of words, although note that the shortest possible form of a word is used, that is amaze and excite and even scare, rather than “amazing” or “excitement” or “scary.”

The two-word doge phrases, though, are really interesting. The first word comes from a limited set (essentially so, such, many, much, and very) but in order to understand how you pick which word follows the first one, we need to talk about a thing called selectional restriction. Put simply, certain words go well with some words, and other words go well with others, and when you don’t obey that, things get weird.

One example are the words much and many. Both of them basically mean “a lot,” but much goes with amorphous masses and many goes with individual countable items. So if you say “much wine was consumed,” you’re talking about a large sea of wine, but if you say “many wines were consumed,” you’re talking about many individual wine-items, in this case probably types of wine like Pinot Grigio or Merlot. But some combinations are better than others: “many wine” or “much wines” is definitely not in the canon of Standard English, but sounds excellent in doge speak.

The same thing goes for other words that have selectional restrictions, such as so and very which typically modify adjectives. So you can say “The wine was so/very delicious” but normally you wouldn’t say something like “so wine” or “very wine”: except, of course, in doge. And what do you put with adjectives like “delicious” in doge? Well, you could combine them with much or many, which we’ve seen normally modify nouns.

Okay, so what about such? Such normally selects for noun phrases, that is, a noun and optional other items: “such a delicious wine,” “such a wine,” “such delicious wines,” “such wines.” Since many of these combinations contain three or more words, they’re instantly out as possible doge phrases, meaning that such is one of the most versatile doge modifiers: it can combine with both nouns, like such wine, and adjectives, like such delicious.

Of course, since none of the five main doge modifiers (much, many, so, very, such) are ever found with verbs in canonical English, all of them are candidates to modify verbs in doge: for example, much eat, many eat, so eat, very eat, and such eat would all work for doge speak. Other modifiers such as quite, rather, and even lotsa are also found more rarely in doge, under similar principles of mismatch.

The thing is, you don’t need to be able to explicitly identify a noun or an adjective in order to speak fluent doge (or for that matter, fluent English of any kind). As a speaker, you instead just have an intuitive sense that so wine sounds a bit off, whether delightfully playful if you’re aiming for doge or just plain weird if you’re aiming for canonical English. In academic linguistic terms, this sense of feeling off is called being “ungrammatical” (not to be confused with silly prohibitions against things like infinitive-splitting, which speakers of English have been doing for centuries.)

You can definitely still find some examples of people using doge speak that aren’t quite as ungrammatical as I’ve described above. But they’re fairly rare, especially among the most popular examples of doge speak, so I’d argue that these people are in fact not quite as adept at doge as their more playfully ungrammatical internet neighbours. An example that proves my point conveniently popped up on my Facebook while I was writing this, showing someone actually correcting someone else’s use of doge modifiers to be more ungrammatical.

Friend #1 (posting link): Doge is a rescue dog. Much respect. So noble. Wow.

Friend #2 (commenting): Your dogeing is too coherent. “Much noble, so respect.”

Why do shiba inus speak ungrammatically?

But what is it about shiba inus that makes them violate the selectional restrictions of certain English modifiers? Even if you’re a devoted animal fan and you swear that Fluffy understands you when you talk about dinner or the vet, I highly doubt you think that Fluffy actually talks back in English sentences, grammatical or not. And, I mean, dogs are both colourblind and renowned for their sophisticated taste in typography so they would clearly never arrive at multicolored Comic Sans as a font of choice.

The real source probably comes from a combination of two other influences: how we as humans talk to our pets, and how we talk to each other on the internet.

The first factor is the kind of “baby talk” that we do towards our pets, known in the literature as pet-directed speech (yes, there are actual studies on this). It tends to involve speaking with exaggerated pitch and using simplified sentence structure. By comparison, the “baby talk” that we do towards actual children involves these two factors plus extra-precise articulation of sounds and is known as infant-directed speech (formerly motherese until some genius realized that it’s not only mothers who talk to babies).

But of course, if we speak to our pets in baby talk or simplified language, then it’s only logical to assume that when we anthropomorphize our pets, they’d speak back to us the same way. So doge and its predecessor LOLcat tell us nothing at all about dogs or cats but everything in terms of how we’re talking to pets and to each other on the internet.

The second factor that goes into doge is the general principle of internet language these days that the more overwhelmed with emotions you are, the less sensical your sentence structure gets, which I’ve described elsewhere as “stylized verbal incoherence mirroring emotional incoherence” and which leads us to expressions like “feels,” “I can’t even/I’ve lost the ability to can,” and “because reasons.” Contrast this with first-generation internet language, demonstrated by LOLcat or 1337speak, and in general characterized by abbreviations containing numbers and single letters, often in caps (C U L8R), smilies containing noses, and words containing deliberate misspellings. We’ve now moved on: broadly speaking, second-generation internet language plays with grammar instead of spelling. If you’re a doomsayer, the innovative syntax is one more thing to throw up your hands about, but compared to a decade or two ago, the spelling has gotten shockingly conventional.

The next generation of internet language

In this sense, doge really is the next generation of LOLcat, in terms of a pet-based snapshot of a certain era in internet language. We’ve kept the idea that animals speak like an exaggerated version of an internet-savvy human, but as our definitions of what it means to be a human on the internet have changed, so too have the voices that we give our animals. Wow.

Tags: , , , , , ,

Related Posts

Gretchen McCulloch

Gretchen McCulloch

More from Gretchen McCulloch →

146 Comments

    2. nonvolleyball +7

      I was in the middle of emailing some linguistics scholars while I took a break to read this, & it took all my willpower not to forward them the link (in a flagrantly unprofessional maneuver). I want this series to analyze EVERYTHING about this glorious internet culture of ours.

      1. tragicallyludicrous +10

        I posted the macro to the Facebook wall of my one linguist friend and I really hope she likes it so I can send her the rest.

      2. allthingslinguistic +12

        Obviously you should have sent it to them. My linguist friends on facebook are enjoying the hell out of this right now (aka there may be follow up posts with more analysis stemming from a particular discussion thread, for which stay tuned to my blog I guess, or I’ll try to remember to post anything here?)

        1. nonvolleyball +4

          I can’t be confident enough that they’re aware of “doge” to blow my cover as a Responsible Adult Person. although one of them did once mention Quileute in the context of the “Twilight” series (& I bit my tongue when another followed up with a zombie joke…).

    3. Chris

      Thanks for a great article. I want to add though that lolspeak also sometimes plays with grammar.
      E.g. the expression “I can has” could hardly be described as grammatically correct. ^^

    2. tragicallyludicrous +8

      I know! I have a weakness for internet memes/internetspeak so well this was always going to happen but.

      1. cosmia +4

        It’s not even that I have a specific weakness for Internet memes but I think I just have a weakness for adorable dumb dogs on the Internet!

    3. anon210 +22

      Aw man, they need to bring in Gretchen as a consultant. “very icy” should pretty clearly be “very ice,” and “so wow” is not doge at all.

      1. allthingslinguistic +16

        See, this is what made doge hard to analyze. I get the feeling that “very ice” and the like are better, but you actually do see people saying stuff like “so wow”, so do I reject them because they don’t support my analysis, or do I create an analysis that’s too broad for what’s in really fluent doge speakers’ heads? (I erred on the side of the former here, but neither route is totally satisfying.)

        1. nightsstar +2

          I don’t know, I think “so wow” is very doge, but maybe because I’ve seen it used enough. Doesn’t it fit into the selection restriction thing in that you would never say “that concert was so wow”, but it fits in doge speak?

          1. allthingslinguistic +3

            Yeah, I think “so wow” may be more common on an image macro than in running text, and not utterance-finally.

        2. anon210 +15

          All I’ll say is that I find it much more amusing when “wow” is used by itself. Frankly, that makes the meme for me; whenever I see one of these, I’m always looking for that singular “wow.” Obviously, as a linguist you have to describe and not prescribe, but I like your approach as describing an ideal form of doge that is sometimes not attained by less fluent speakers.

          1. allthingslinguistic +8

            Yeah, I would say canonically that there’s a solitary “wow” at the end for me, but see my reply to the person above you for maybe there can be “so wow” midway through or in image macros. Perhaps we’ll have clearer judgements as doge gets more established.

          2. fireblargg +23

            Or we’ll end up with another prescriptivist/descriptivist conflict. Descriptivists (dogescritivists?) will champion the ever-evolving nature of doge, and to oppose them, some sort of Académie française du doge will be formed in order to purge all occurrences of “so wow” from the net.

    4. bgprincipessa +16

      Yeah, I love this article but I also need to understand why it’s so damn funny. It shouldn’t be this funny, right?

    5. lilsebastian01 +36

      Doge weather gave the phrase “so lovely” for Minneapolis, which is currently -4 F/-20 C, so I call bullshit.

      such inaccurate
      much lies
      wow

      1. tragicallyludicrous +9

        It’s giving me “so soak. such chilly.” I’m going to be seeing that until April.

      2. elsajeni +8

        “wow light rain. much raindrops. so shower. very coat.” Which is pretty accurate actually, it’s like 38 and drizzling.

  7. aravisthequeen +115

    You guys, I love doge SO MUCH that my husband bought me a shirt for Christmas that has doge on it and it says SO FASHION. It was so popular it was on backorder and I have worn it every day for two weeks.

    We also got a calendar with shiba inus and wrote doge captions in it.

    I may have a problem.

  8. NicoleCliffe +57

    I don’t want everyone to get so excited about this that they forget about Benedict Cumberbatch, tho. Not even for a second. If someone isn’t thinking about him every second, the Götterdämmerung will fall.

      1. Samk12345 +6

        Gotta rise above it
        Gotta try to get along
        Gotta walk together
        Gotta sing this song
        Catdoge!
        Catdoge!

  10. PonyAlong +16

    Just another wonderful, esoteric and “tickle me pink” article by a talented writer, courtesy of the Toast. When summer comes, I’m wearing the hell out of my Toastie T-shirt.

  11. EPWordsnatcher +75

    I have also heard the humor of dogespeak explained this way: basically, it’s a dog (doge)’s inner monologue. I truly do think this is on to something–totally makes sense (to me) that small excitable dogs would think this way. so squirrel, very excite, much porch hiding, so love, wow.

    1. Ophelia +15

      Agree. This is exactly how I imagine my dog talking, particularly the fact that everything is wow.

    2. aravisthequeen +12

      And the dog(e) is surprised at finding itself with an inner monologue! Dogs are not usually known for introspective qualities. (Bless them.)

      1. EPWordsnatcher +5

        YES. Perfect. Also I think you’re the one I heard this explanation from in the first place, so credit where credit is due.

  13. dakimel +69

    “And, I mean, dogs are both colourblind and renowned for their sophisticated taste in typography so they would clearly never arrive at multicolored Comic Sans as a font of choice.”

    The entire article is a fascinating delight, as per usual with you, but this line is the smiliest.

    2. much comment +3

      LOVE this article, but just wanted to point out in response to this little bit that dogs can actually see colour; the notion that they see black and white, or mostly just one colour, is a myth. They can see roughly the same spectrum as a person who is red-green colour blind. http://www.colourblindawareness.org/colour-blindn… So a dog might, in fact, arrive at multi-coloured as a choice for something. Not sure about their taste for Comic Sans though…

    1. anon210 +17

      I want to share this with the linguist in my life, but at the same time I kind of don’t want her to know about The Toast? I’m weird like this; I don’t like people who I’m close to to know how I spend my time online, even when it’s something amazing like The Toast.

      1. beatrizcentury +7

        I was like that once, and now I’m posting left and right because damn it, I can own my obsession with this website. And you know, if someone put together that I am BeatrizCentury, I’d I guess be proud of them at this point.

  16. nightsstar +15

    What about pronunciation! Am I the only one that imagines that doge out loud would have to be spoken slowly, and in a monotone voice?

    ETA: Like part of the ungrammaticality (I may be using this incorrectly!) is the disconnect between saying phrases and words that express enthusiasm in an unenthusiastic way?

    1. allthingslinguistic +10

      I also get that sense. I feel like doge is spoken with a very flat affect (probably because of the lowercase+periods), but I have no way to quantify this. Anyone else?

      1. greyhavens9 +12

        The way I hear it in my head is pretty monotone, but with slight emphasis on the first word.

        much feels
        such happy
        so toast

    2. honey_cowl +13

      That is interesting! My personal doge-speak is certainly the opposite. Lilting and kind of manic. “wooOOOw!”

    3. Lobster +10

      No way, it has to be said with a big grin on your face, because “very feels, much excite!” Doge is definitely not to be spoken or read in a monotone, though perhaps if you aren’t yet fluent in it you might read it more slowly than you would read Standard English (same as with any other departure from your native language[s]).

      Dogs (doges) are exciteable creatures, especially the ones that would speak doge. Think Dug from Up. “I have just met you and I love you,” he says. “Very meet, many love. Wow,” says doge

    4. Diane +4

      No, I think this too! It’s the ungrammatical nature of the phrases combined with what I interpret as a droll recitation. (Although to me that doesn’t mean doge is unexcited, it’s just doge’s way.)

  17. Laura +19

    Sorry to be the cynic here, but this language is clearly a parody of foreign speakers’ mistakes in English (and possibly a specific group if I would think about it more), just as lol cats’ language was a sanitized minstrelsy (I.e. parody of stereotyped African American speech.)

    2. yahtzii +70

      Sorry to be the cynic here, but this language is clearly a parody of what it would sound like if a dog (possibly a specific breed if I think about it more) could talk, just as internet commenting is becoming a sanitized form of whinery.

      1. Linette +39

        Uh. No. Ebonics (which is what I assume “stereotyped African American speech” means), now more correctly called African American Vernacular English, has its own distinct grammatical rules, and “I can has cheezburger” decidedly violates them. I’m sure our linguist would be able to break this down much better than I can, but I read a whole book about whether or not AAVE is technically a dialect and what the rules are about that, and it was fascinating, and this person is just wrong.

        1. Laura +2

          Obviously I don’t mean that lol cats speak proper AAVE. They speak minstrel language as popularized by blackface performers such as Stephen Foster (Suwanee River)

          1. Linette +10

            If you can find parallels between this and this, then Mallory is correct: you are clearly stretching so far that you should try out for Cirque de Soleil as a contortionist.

          2. very skeptic. wow +9

            “…but I eated it” is a particularly clear case of lolcats being like “baby talk”: children acquiring standard English seem to go through a phase between learning the past tense morpheme and mastering irregular verbs, where they over-regularize everything. (Eated, swimmed, goed, etc.) I’m no AAVE expert, so for all I know there are forms of it where this same feature shows up in the adult grammar; but if it happens there, I’m not specifically aware of it. Like, I know that “habitual ‘be'” and “stressed ‘been'” are things in AAVE, but I’d never heard of things like “eated” being grammatical. (Thus, I’d be surprised if popular culture were attuned to it to such an extent that it would have an influence on lolcats.)

            I looked up the original 1851 lyrics to “Old Folks at Home” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Folks_at_Home), and the only syntactically non-standard thing I found there was “All the world am sad and dreary” (which doesn’t resemble any aspect of the way lolcats talk). There are some “dialect” sound substitutions (‘d’ for ‘th’, ‘b’ for ‘v’), but otherwise it looks like 19th-century standard English (or, at least, my idea of what that is). “My Old Kentucky Home” (http://www.songofamerica.net/cgi-bin/iowa/song/555.html) is similar: it looks archaic to my 21st-century ear, but otherwise pretty normal. (I’m assuming that there was similar “dialect” phonology in the original version and whoever put it on that website re-standardized it; otherwise, these appear to be the original, unbowdlerized lyrics.)

            I’d argue that what “makes” a lolcat *is* the syntax (combined with “txt spk” features like no caps and weird spelling), so I’m still skeptical.

            As for doge being a parody of non-native English speakers: L2 acquisition is *also* not my area of expertise, but is it really a salient feature of anyone’s L2 English that they consistently get the syntactic categories wrong? The syntactic categories of *degree expressions*, in particular? It would seem that errors in agreement are much more common: singular/plural (“two cat”), subject/verb (“he sing”), gender (listen to me speaking German sometime), and so on. I’m sure other linguists know more about these issues than I do (the author, Gretchen, for instance) – but that’s the source of my skepticism on these points.

          3. Linette +10

            Mine is more the fact that you can trace the evolution of lolcats over time, and it’s pretty clear it’s a riff on babytalk or, at the very least, dopey-ness (which is to say, not stupid in the sense of being uneducated, but stupid in the sense of being endearingly foolish, like Dopey in Disney’s Snow White). I suppose there’s a temptation to think that all languages that imply the person it’s attributed to is stupid are the same, but lolcats has always seemed to be the kind of affectionate making-fun-of that you might do with your children’s babytalk (i.e., saying “pasketti” instead of “spaghetti” when imitating your kid), while minstrelry is clearly saying, “ha-ha, you stupid people don’t know how to talk right.”

  18. two_ogres +21

    “But what is it about shiba inus that makes them violate the selectional restrictions of certain English modifiers? Even if you’re a devoted animal fan and you swear that Fluffy understands you when you talk about dinner or the vet, I highly doubt you think that Fluffy actually talks back in English sentences, grammatical or not.”

    i love this article, and i have no desire to be debbie downer, but i’m curious about your thoughts on the accusation? theory? depressing suggestion?, which i’ve heard in various places/from various people that doge has something to do with caricaturing non-native english speakers. shiba inus = recognizably japanese dog –> broken english = kind of racist?

    addendum: or the supplementary possibility that doge is drawing on this more distantly by way of the longstanding memespeak tradition of mocking bad translation – all your base are belong to us, etc.

    1. EPWordsnatcher +25

      I generally assumed that it wasn’t Shiba Inus’ ancestry that made them the go-to doge, but rather the unnervingly humanesque facial expression (see below) that made the words that much funnier in contrast. Obviously I don’t know the intentions of whoever originated Dogespeak, but I never thought of it as a cultural thing.

    2. allthingslinguistic +39

      There are definitely memespeak traditions of mocking bad translations and other non-canonical uses of language as well as having animals speak ungrammatically, which I do think this draws on. And it’s hard to tell the difference between using language creatively as a fun game versus doing so as a parody of less fluent speakers. Since I haven’t found the first examples of the doge meme (has someone done this? I’d be very interested!), I can’t say whether it started out in such a spirit.

      I will say that I’ve been tracking the doge meme fairly heavily for the past few months and I’ve never seen things like stereotypical “Engrish” included that would lead me to believe it’s directly based on mocking non-native speakers. Given the memish internet’s familiarity with terms like “kawaii” and “-san/-chan”, I feel like if the goal was to parody Japanese ESL speakers, it could be done a lot more effectively. (I mean, I’m sure that there are a few terribly offensive doges somewhere on the internet, but a few obscure people using a popular meme to be offensive doesn’t necessarily mean that the meme itself is predicated on offensiveness.) For what it’s worth, this is also not normally the type of error that I’ve heard from non-native speakers, although racists aren’t necessarily known for their accuracy.

    3. baby_crow +2

      “doge is drawing on this more distantly by way of the longstanding memespeak tradition of mocking bad translation” — I feel like this has got to be related to it somehow. even if I do howl with laughter at every one of these phrases.

    4. mirandawmeyer +12

      I think that whether it’s intentional or not, there may, occasionally, be overlap just by sheer accident. The meme is predicated on doing English grammar wrong; people learning the language are going to make mistakes; on occasion, the two sets may intersect. This says precisely nothing about the intention of the origin of the meme, but it can certainly make it look xenophobic regardless.

      The thing that more definitely separates it for me is that at least in my experience, dogespeak is rigidly formulaic. Usually two two-word phrases, separated by periods, then “wow.” No human actually talks like this, regardless of how much English they do or don’t know. It reflects no cadence of non-native speech I recognize, nor does it reflect what you see on engrish.com or similar. The point isn’t simply wrongness for wrongness’s sake, it’s a very specific type of wrongness that doesn’t really fit anything else. If I saw memes that made a point of ending sentences with “that’s cool” where it doesn’t belong, or misconjugating verbs, or changing around prepositions, that would very definitely point to making fun of non-native English speakers. Just like how when someone is appropriating AAVE it’s very, very clear, because even white people have a strong (if not fully articulated) sense of what AAVE sounds like on the superficial slang level on which it gets appropriated. (A reverse example would be in Alif the Unseen, when an American character says in Arabic, “The Arabic of mine is not a hundred in a hundred.” That was so recognizable as an English speaker’s mistake–I speak as one such–that I laughed for a good five minutes. It was very clearly at the character’s expense.)

      And then secondly, the laughter at dogespeak has never felt derisive to me; rather, affectionate and delighted. I have no way of backing this up, it’s just my perception.

  21. clairezulkey +25

    I posted something about doge on a friend’s wall (that Iceberg had sent me, of course) and a third party opined that the doge is a racist creation designed to mock those who don’t speak English so wow. So suppressed eye roll. Much humorless.

  23. Eric +45

    Great post! You wrote:

    “Doge speak is clearly composed of subunits which are divided by a period in running text, which I’m going to call doge phrases. The period is optional in images, but in that case the phrases are scattered artistically around the picture.”

    I don’t think this is right. I think true native doge must be scattered artistically. I think the running-text form is akin to transliteration and as a result misses something very important about the image. I think the scattering is important because it promotes a feeling that doge is “sequenceless” and is conceptually “all at once.” That is, the subunits are all part of one conceptual underlying utterance / quale that is cloudlike or amorphous in time. The subunits are different reflections of the same underlying wowness.

    You can see with icebergmama’s contribution how with two actors, the doge clouds surround each of them, but there is no concept of “replied” present; the two thoughts are simultaneous and overlapping.

    1. icebergmama +10

      OH this is a good point about simultaneity of thought. although I was actually attributing all thoughts to Doge.

  26. Martin +18

    During my previous life as an English teacher in Asia, I would hear unintentional doge phrases from my students every day. The concept that English uses different words to modify countable and uncountable nouns, or to intensify phrases of quality versus quantity, was easy enough to understand intellectually, but when actually speaking even my best students tended to forget about it. And when they got excited, these were the first rules to go out the window. I’m having flashbacks now from my hours of reading student essays.

  28. TiaBaheri +14

    I’m so ecstatic. I’ve been showing this to people all day and they just keep looking at me with that look people give you when they want to pretend they understand the thing you’re excited about but really they’re just like “uh-huh, that’s nice sweeties, that’s really nice”. I DON’T CARE I AM SO HAPPY ABOUT THIS I WILL SHOUT FROM ROOFTOPS

    1. allthingslinguistic +4

      I’m glad you liked it! I believe I linked to your article on can even, which was definitely inspirational!

      1. TiaBaheri +4

        Stop it. I read your blog so avidly! You writing for the toast is the meeting of two of my favourite things.

        1. allthingslinguistic +4

          Hahaha you should have heard my toast-reading friends when I told them I’d be writing here (to be fair I’ve been reading since inception so I was also pretty darn psyched).

  29. infostockpile +11

    I can’t believe how perfect the timing of this post is. I was trying to describe the grammar of doge just this afternoon at work, but I couldn’t articulate it. Several coworkers are about to get an email with a whole bunch of exclamation points in the subject line.

  32. lektorathanke +5

    Even the linguistics is great on the Toast 🙂 Too much columns very problems.
    ‘Nice’ example that came to my mind: “There’s dog on the street.”
    By the way, now I wonder how far you get if you consider an unmarked/not distinct plural form.

    1. Diane +2

      Ooh, this reminds me! The spelling of doge is a bit off – specifically on words with a “sh” sound (“many delishus”, etc). I wonder what that’s about, and not to be a total buzzkill, but I am interested if the meme is at all related to ESL speaker’s trouble with the language. I hope not, because it makes me LOL.

  35. Hib +22

    I’m surprised at the lack of mention of the Asian ESL connection & similar memes that have been put there for years. It’s no accident that doge uses pics of a Japanese breed – doge language is a goof on Asian (esp Japanese & Chinese) hacked English translations, esp the overuse/misuse of modifiers. There are multiple related memes/sources, including the Chinglish channel in the I Can Haz Cheezburger empire, & even an Etsy store selling items with Chinglish & other Asian language English hacks (like “tiny grass is dreaming” for a lawn sign).

  36. xoirenejoy +13

    i love doge so much, i can’t even. i keep wondering when i’m going to get sick of it.

  37. Mel Nicholson +7

    I adore the way you use “scare” as a “shorter” version “scary” — you made the idea of counting morphemes mostly work in PopLing. (scare < scar(e) + y).

    I suspect you need to look further than the interaction with pets for the art source. People in general do not speak to animals using roots in place of conjugated terms, nor with any of the aspects of lolspeak.

    Amaze analyze. wow. Very hope. Much leep. So fail.

  38. Hillary +4

    This has the cadence I’d seen from Lynda Barry’s “Fred Milton, Beat Poodle” and if that hasn’t been combined yet, it’s a pairing overdue.

  41. David Williams +2

    Thanks for this. I’ve only just come across Doge speak recently after getting into Dogecoin (which is a cryptocurrency based on the meme). As someone who’s fairly young but not young enough to be into the current generation’s fads it was a bit of a head scratch. Some of them have made me laugh though.

  43. treacle +12

    I thought that Shiba Inus spoke English ungrammatically because they were non-native English-dog speakers. They appear to be Japanese-dog speakers (eg. they say “wan wan (ワンワン)”, instead of “woof woof”, whereas French-dog speakers say “ouah ouah”). As we know, Shiba Inus are in fact a Japanese breed of dog.

    Thus, in my proposal/brain, native Japanese-dog speakers speak a broken English, now coined as ‘doge’.

    So grammar! Very literacy.

    But perhaps this has been said upthread already… I couldn’t bring myself them all. So comment! Very speaky. Amaze.

  46. Aaron +7

    I found my way here, confused, after a friend posted this on Facebook: “much tree. such applicative. many chomsky. such wow.” Syntax class in a nutshell.

  48. allrocksgotoheaven +5

    The interesting thing is that l337-speak – which proceeded LolCats and I guess would be “zeroth generation internet speak” in your formulation – was created for a specific, functional purpose: defeating early text recognition software, thus requiring administrators and government-types to shut down exchanges of “w4r3z” and “pr0n” and exploits of “h4xing” rather than relying on software flagging to do it for them. And of course, once “hackers” became a sort of lionized subcultural figure…yeah. (I thought this was pretty well-known, but I hadn’t seen anyone mention it). LolCat and Doge seem much more…organic?

  49. Kade Azkyroth

    The interesting thing is that l337-speak – which proceeded LolCats and I guess would be "zeroth generation internet speak" in your formulation – was created for a specific, functional purpose: defeating early text recognition software, thus requiring administrators and government-types to shut down exchanges of "w4r3z" and "pr0n" and exploits of "h4xing" rather than relying on software flagging to do it for them. And of course, once "hackers" became a sort of lionized subcultural figure…yeah. (I thought this was pretty well-known, but I hadn't seen anyone mention it). LolCat and Doge seem much more…organic?

  51. Casual User

    Hi,

    I don't normally comment on these but I just wanted to stop by and say that this was an incredible read! Really interesting breakdown. I was thinking the other day how the selection of Doge "sentences" were constructed. Never thought about how it would come naturally to me as a native speaker though.

  52. turkeytimeblog +7

    As an English as a Foreign Language teacher, I’m fascinated by intentional “misuses” of grammar. In fact, I may use this meme to teach the different quantifiers to my students. But I have to wonder…was the original author of the doge meme riffing on the infamously bad English of the average Japanese person? As a Japanese American, I am not at all offended if this is the case, but I am certainly sensitive to this possibility. Thoughts?

    1. dmp +1

      I think this (and a lot of other memes with similar grammatical constructs) grew out of Dolan- those comic strips with poorly drawn disney characters and poorly constructed text that were funny for all of about three seconds a few years back. We tired of the Dolan meme form very quickly, but the language structure got ingrained in our collective consciousness and has made appearances in a lot of the “second generation” image-based memes, as well as image macros that can’t really be called memes (tumblr has a lot of these floating around but the only large conglomeration of them in one place that I can think of is comicsanstimlaurence)

    2. Sandy +1

      I think you have something there. This reminds me of the fashion a few years ago of horrible English on T-shirts.

  53. richardsaaron29

    As an English as a Foreign Language teacher, I'm fascinated by intentional "misuses" of grammar. In fact, I may use this meme to teach the different quantifiers to my students. But I have to wonder…was the original author of the doge meme riffing on the infamously bad English of the average Japanese person? As a Japanese American, I am not at all offended if this is the case, but I am certainly sensitive to this possibility. Thoughts?

  54. Tom

    I think that compared to other dogs, shiba inus have more entertaining expressions and reactions to things, which is why there are so many funny pictures and short video clips that allow for the captioning.

  55. Joel +2

    “Doge” can be traced back to 1942. From the film “Casablanca” —

    Mr Leuchtag [starts in standard German]: Liebchen – sweetness, …
    Mr. Leuchtag: what watch?
    Mrs. Leuchtag: Ten watch.
    Mr. Leuchtag: Such much?
    Carl: Hm [that is, “Wow”].
    Carl [reverting to standard English] You will get along beautiful in America, mm-hmm.

    This conversation is indisputably doge. From Gretchen McCulloch’s “A Linguist Explains the Grammar of Doge. Wow”:

    “A minimal doge utterance contains at least two but often three 2-word doge phrases, followed by a single-word doge phrase (most commonly wow).”

    “The two-word doge phrases, though, are really interesting. The first word comes from a limited set (essentially so, such, many, much, and very) …”

    “[S]uch is one of the most versatile doge modifiers: it can combine with both nouns, like such wine, and adjectives, like such delicious.”

  56. elizdelphi +1

    I don’t think you mentioned something I always assumed about “doge” and the use of much, many, so, very, as well as wow, that it humorously represents the personality of a dog that is almost beside itself with being very excited about something. To be so ecstatically excited about something in the self-forgetful way of a hyper dog is the opposite of cool and strikes us as ironic and funny.