Social:DoggoLingo

Short description: Internet language and slang words used to refer to dogs

A dog would be called a "doggo", "pupper" or "pupperino" in DoggoLingo.

DoggoLingo is an Internet language that is created from word conversion, meme lexicon, and onomatopoeia. Emerging in the 2010s, DoggoLingo is implied to be a dog's own idiom, and is presented as what humans have long believed goes on in the canine brain. Elyse Graham, assistant professor at Stony Brook University, describes DoggoLingo as "upbeat, joyful, and clueless in a relentlessly friendly way".

Structure

DoggoLingo appends various diminutive suffixes "-o", "-er", "-ino" to existing English words (e.g. dog turns into doggo, pup turns into pupper) as well as DoggoLingo words that have been created (e.g. pupper turns into pupperino, bork turns into borker). DoggoLingo relies heavily upon onomatopoeia: Words such as blep, blop, and mlem describe the action of a dog sticking out its tongue, or other forms of facial expression; bork, boof, woof describe the various canine barking sounds. A dog with a fluffy coat may be called a floof or a fluff. DoggoLingo follows a similar rudimentary style to create its verbs (e.g. doin me a in place of present participles with the speaker as object, such as doin me a scare "scaring me") and adjectives (e.g. heckin in place of degree modifiers such as extremely). 'Heck' is frequently used in place of more conventional expletives. Some words also come from eye dialect spellings of English words, such as fren "friend".

Origin

DoggoLingo emerged in the 2010s, but its exact origin is unknown. Various social media accounts such as WeRateDogs on Twitter and Dogspotting on Facebook, as well as social news aggregation and imageboard websites like 4chan, Reddit, or Tumblr have aided in popularizing the use of DoggoLingo by consistently using or hosting content that uses the lingo on their Internet pages. In 2014, the Dogspotting Facebook account gained popularity, especially in Australia where, coincidentally, adding "-o" to the end of words is also a feature of Australian slang. Usage of DoggoLingo peaked around 2017.

Linguist Gretchen McCulloch characterized the language as "taking on characteristics of how people would address their animals in the first place", and noted that it was used by people talking as themselves online, in contrast to the mid-2000s lolcat trend where images of cats were captioned as if the cat were speaking.

Examples

Lingo word	Base word	Meaning
blep or mlem	N/A	Onomatopoeic term for action of an animal sticking out its tongue.
boop	N/A	The act of lightly and gently tapping something, such as a dog's nose.
bork or boof	bark/woof	Term for the verb "bark", commonly used in memes.
doggo	dog	An affectionate term for dogs.
fren	friend	A word for friend, commonly used to illustrate the dog's point of view towards its owner or other dogs. In 2023, an analyst from the Southern Poverty Law Center noted the term having been adopted as a deliberately "innocuous" and "baby talk" self-description by the far-right online, with the word being used as a backronym for "far-right ethnonationalist".
henlo	hello	An affectionate way of saying "hello".
hooman	human	An affectionate way of addressing humans, e.g, "My hooman is my best fren!"
pupper or pupperino	puppy	An affectionate word for puppies.
woofer, floofer or boofer	woof	A word for a very big dog, used affectionately.

Other animals

Many other animals are referred to differently in DoggoLingo: for example, one would refer to a snake as snek or danger noodle, a human as hooman, a cat as catto (cf. doggo), a bird as birb, and a bee as a spicy sky raisin.

See also

• Balltze (aka Cheems)
• Doge (meme)
• Hypocorism
• Pig Latin