My husband and I were talking about leet speech last night (I realized that I read all the abbreviations as the actual full words, and wondered if kids who grew up with it do the same, or if brb is just brb to them), and the idea of leet becoming a real language was raised. I don’t know enough about language to know how this would go, so I’m turning to you big-brains. 
Is leet a language now? Does it have potential to become a real language? What would that take/look like?
I don’t know what you mean by becoming an “actual living language”. The closest I can come to putting a meaning on that is that you’re asking, “Can it become the first language that a child learns growing up?” The problem is that no one speaks it now and no one would consider speaking it to a baby. Spoken languages are the first languages of nearly all children. Sign languages (like ASL) are the first language of all the others. How could a child learn leet speech as its first language?
Another possible meaning for your question is that it’s saying, “Can it become so different from English that no English speaker who hasn’t learned it could understand it at all?” Yes, that’s possible, but it would be rather contradictory to the purposes for which leet speech is now used. The point of leet speech is that any halfway clever person can fairly quickly pick up its rules. If it were that different from ordinary English, not very many people would want to use it.
Possibly, if a small group of leet-speakers was isolated long enough to raise several generations in it.
But is leet a full language? I thought it was more a written mode of English.
I personally suspect it will fade, but leave a few slang words behind, washed up on the beach of linguistic history, rather like ‘OK’ is a survival from a fad of the mid-nineteeth century.
No – it’s a dialect, because it’s mutually comprehensible with English; and it’s unusual as a dialect, because it primarily exists in written form, not in spoken form.
I think that’s unlikely, because its community will always be bringing in new members, who generally will have English as a first language. If it becomes too hard for English speakers/readers to understand, it won’t draw in that new group. However, subgroups within that community could develop new forms designed more for exclusion than for inclusion – and if that aim were successful, then a new language would have been formed, because of the lack of mutual intelligibility.
Well, it would look like l33t, but even more so, in that it would be harder to see the connections between the codes and the English (or other) words they were based on, e.g.:
elite > leet > l33t > l334 > !##$
Ever do that boobless thing on a calculator, 55378008, then hold it upside down and laugh for like 372384729387 hours?
*sorry…I don’t know how o make the text upside down.
A language can exist without being the first language of anyone. Latin is a living language, and the official language of one country, but no one now speaks it as a first language.
That’s the normal way than new languages form. However, another way is for a group to develop their own language to preserve secrets from other. A possible example is Thieves’ Cant, which was based on English, but with enough specialised vocabulary to make it incomprehensible to English speakers.
I came in to say almost exactly what Giles said. He’s got it exactly right. As long as it’s a variant of English, it’s only a written dialect, which is indeed quite unusual.
1337-speak is already dead. It’s all LOLs now.
Where does the 4 come from? A “t” is usually represented by a 7 in my experience.
Sorry – I’m betraying the fact that I’m not a native l33t sp34ker.
Giles writes:
> A language can exist without being the first language of anyone. Latin is a living
> language, and the official language of one country, but no one now speaks it as
? a first language.
Yeah, but Latin was once the first language of a large group of people. Furthermore, by most people’s definitions, it’s not a living language. Most people would say that it’s a dead language. It depends on what one means by the term “living language.” (Incidentally, note that most of my post was phrased as questions. That means I was asking featherlou to define her terms before we answer her question. What you’re doing is defining the terms yourself and then making a big deal about the fact that I didn’t use your definitions, which are not universally accepted.)
The term “living language” is used in many different ways. Some people would say that a language with only native one speaker left is a dead language. They would say that no conversations can occur in that language anymore, so it’s dead. Some people would say that a language dies the moment the last native speaker of it dies. They would say that it doesn’t matter if there are any speakers left who learned the language in adulthood. (And, yes, I’ve read books and articles where each of these definitions are used.)
In fact, there are many levels of language use:
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Languages spoken by over 1,000,000 native speakers. These languages, unless there is major genocide or a major disaster wipes out most of humanity, are going to last for at least the next two hundred years or so.
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Languages spoken by 1,000 to 1,000,000 native speakers. It’s iffy whether these will last for the next two hundred years. Some people would say that such languages are moribund.
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Languages spoken by less than 1,000 native speakers. Like it or not, these languages will probably not last for the next two hundred years. Some of them will die out within a few years. These are dying languages.
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Ritual ritual languages like Latin, Sanscrit, Pali, and Old Slavonic. No one grows up speaking them. Many people read and sometimes speak them, although they learn them as adults. It’s likely that they will continue to hold their position for a few centuries yet.
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Ancient languages that are studied by scholars like Ancient Egyptian. No one speaks them, although they can read them fairly well. In all probability, scholars will continue to study them for a few centuries more.
What you define as a living language is arbitrary.
Yes, Latin is a special case. I would argue that it’s a living language because:
(1) people still carry on conversations in the language;
(2) new documents are being published in the language; and
(3) new words are still being added to the language.
The last point is true not because it’s the ritual language of the Catholic Church, but because it’s the formal language of biological taxonomy, and new species and genera get new names in the Latin language.
However, it’s an example of how a language can be a living language with no native speakers. Another possible example of this is Hebrew, which for a long time had no native speakers, but now has revived so that there are children who learn it as a first language. And then there are the artificial languages like Esperanto, which can easily live with no native speakers, because enough people speak them as a second language.
Leet is a dialect, not a language, but it’s a living dialect even though it has no one who learns it as a first language.
I think that’s why it could never become a living language- languages don’t usually make it if its speakers change it every time they think it’s getting too mainstream.
People can carry on conversations in Queyna or Klingon, but I wouldn’t call them living languages. Latin’s rules are fixed and no longer naturally evolve through daily use; rather, new words are constructed deliberately to fit the format.
In any case, I wouldn’t call l337-speak a living language, either; it’s more of a cant or a cipher. First, it was designed to bypass detection from computer censors much as the Thieves’ Cant was designed to be unnoticed by authorities. Second, its pronunciation and orthography is inextricably linked to the pronunciation and orthography of the mother language — 3 is E and 7 = T because they look vaguely similar, 8 = ate and u = you because they sound similar. Should English change, then l337-speak (in English) would change.
I wrote:
> 4. Ritual ritual languages like Latin, Sanscrit, Pali, and Old Slavonic. No one
> grows up speaking them. Many people read and sometimes speak them,
> although they learn them as adults. It’s likely that they will continue to hold
> their position for a few centuries yet.
Fixing an error and adding Hebrew (which I should have thought of), I should have said:
> 4. Ritual religious languages like Hebrew, Latin, Sanscrit, Pali, and Old Slavonic.
> No one grows up speaking them. Many people read and sometimes speak them,
> although they learn them as adults. It’s likely that they will continue to hold
> their position for a few centuries yet.
Again, the definition for the term “living language” is highly disputed. I phrased my first post quite deliberately as a series of questions. I am not taking a position on the definition of the term “living language.” Keep me out of this silly argument.
Hasn’t Hebrew been revived to the extent that there are native speakers of Modern Hebrew (e.g., in Israel)? I suppose it holds both the status of ritual language and the status of living language, in different ways; at any rate, one could probably argue over the extent to which revived Hebrew matches liturgical Hebrew.
Actually, I have heard more kids speaking “leet” of late. Actually pronouncing the words, as in “LOL that haxor totally pwned u,” which is pronounced “Lawl, that hacksor totally powned you.”
That said, I doubt it could ever reach “language” status. First, it isn’t new words (for the most part), but creative misspellings, intentional mispronunciations, and abbreviations. Someone mistypes “own” and “pwn” and “the” and “teh” and suddenly everyone’s all about pwn and teh. They come, they grow uncool, they get replaced, all in a matter of a few years.
Leetspeek is more like bebop slang or flapperspeak. It’ll just wander slowly away and some new fad will replace it as the teenagers grow up.
Excuse me, you’re right, Indistinguishable. I should have distinguished between Ancient Hebrew and Modern Hebrew. Ancient Hebrew was an example of category 4 until sometime in the nineteenth century. Modern Hebrew is an example of category 1. I take no position on whether Modern Hebrew is the same language as Ancient Hebrew.
As I said before, they don’t call it “leet”. It’s called “LOLspeak”.
LOLspeak is a different (though related) dialect/jargon/whatever from leet. The latter is mostly distinguished from standard English by vocabulary, whereas the former is distinguished primarily by its grammar. InvisibleWombat’s example is leet; the archtypical example of LOLspeak is “I can has cheezburger?”.