Cats can has grammar: Anil Dash takes on the lolcat phenomenon. A quotation: "The fact that we can tell no cat would talk like this shows that kitty pidgin is actually quite consistent."

Do you know how much I love that? How much it warms the cockles of my deeply-geeky, very-nearly-majored-in-linguistics-before-I-realized-how-much-its-job-market-sucked heart?

I totally, totally HEART that people are talking about lolcat grammar like it's a real language, that it's something that can be analyzed. I totally HEART that people can go "Well, this sentence works, but this one is totally wrong" - that people can (subconsciously) grasp that there are apparently rules to kitty-pidgin and they know when those rules are being violated. (There's a followup post, but it's not quite as informative as the original)

Language Log surmises that lolcat is actually just a modern variant of pet baby-talk, and cites a Wodehouse passage as an example of someone doing what I think of as "Tricky-Woo talk" (from the All Creatures Great and Small episode - Tricky-Woo was one of those little rat-dogs that was so pampered, he would go into an (apparently faked) asthma attack as a way of getting his owner to pay attention to him and give him treats.)

I would beg to differ; lolcat speak is more of a true pidgin than it is babytalk, I think. It shares some qualities with Engrish (and yes, I know, I am going to Hell for laughing at Engrish.), in particular, the absurdity and the wrong-but-rulebound types of verb conjugation.

I wonder if in 20 years, if linguistics departments still exist, if someone will study the rise of lolcat language. (Part of me kind of hopes so, but part of me kind of doesn't. Already we seem to have an awful lot of "useless stuff" that gets turned into dissertations these days.)