What Chronos said.
I probably shouldn’t have tossed that LOL in my “leet” example, but it’s one of the things that actually predates both LOLspeak and leetspeak. It’s been around a long time, and the leetspeakers are saying it out loud now as “lawl”
I’ve seen people say “LOLspeak” for things like “pwned” and “teh” long before ICHC.
What we needs here is a professional linguist who’s studied the LOL/1337 corpus extensively.
I think it does have the (rather unlikely) chance of becoming a trade pidgin. For that to happen, you would need speakers of different languages to use it to conduct business. I can envision a futuristic version of this emerging that allowed, for example, players from different countries to interact on MMPRPGs.
Leet is probably most closely related to other slanguages like Pig Latin and the hundreds of other variations created by movement, substitution, or addition of syllables. Although people can speak Pig Latin freely, it’s not either a language or a true dialect.
The living language question is also muddied by artificial languages like Esperanto, which is probably not the first language of any child but is widely spoken and evolves with the times.
When it comes to Pig Esperanto all the linguists stop up their ears and go LA LA LA LA LA LA.
Interesting ideas; it occurs to me that my original question should probably have been about leet becoming the language of the internet rather than a spoken language; I don’t think leet will become a real spoken language, but I think it has potential to become the lingua franca of the internet (possibly with people who grew up with it more fluent writing in leet than in English).
Minor nitpick: Esperanto is a native language of a few people, but those people grew up in multilingual households and typically have more than one native language.
It seems to me that developing a new language is much like developing a new species. Unless the speakers of the ‘new’ language completely separate from the ‘old’ language speakers, the two languages can never truly diverge.
Expanding on Sunspace: Not that many, but there are some; most famously, George Soros.
The problem there is that trade pidgins are simplified versions or melds of other languages. They’re intended to make it easier to communicate. Leetspeak began as a way to make it HARDER for “outsiders” to understand what was being said (“we’re leet - you can’t even understand us”). It doesn’t facilitate communications at all.
It began that way, but some things (like LOL) are obviously there to make things easier to type. Others are things that resulted from unintentional misspelling that became widely imitated (which is how I imagine many new spoken words evolve.) A lot of speech used in things like MMPORPGs is highly streamlined to facilitate communication, and some of those terms leak over.
Again, I think it’s unlikely that leet speak will reach the point where it allows two people who speak different languages to communicate, but it’s not outside of the realm of possibility.
What will happen, and what has already started to happen, is that a few words from leet speech will filter into ordinary English.
Do you think that’s as far as it will go?
Yep.
OK