In 2008, Ben Huh estimated that I Can Has Cheezburger received about 8,000 submissions a day. That is a lot of cats asking for editorial consideration. Behind the photographs was LOLspeak, a playful version of English whose apparent mistakes had recognisable patterns. The site gave those patterns a huge audience, but the joke and its conventions belonged to a wider community. A cat could sound hilariously wrong in English and still sound right to another lolcat fan.
Table of Contents
- Before Cheezburger, the Cats Had a Community
- January 11, 2007: The Day the Joke Got an Editor
- The Rules of LOLspeak, Reverse Engineered
- Linguists Checked, and LOLspeak Held Up
- Older Ancestors and Foreign Cousins
- LOLCODE: When the Dialect Became a Programming Language
- From LOLspeak to DoggoLingo
- Frequently Asked Questions
Before Cheezburger, the Cats Had a Community
Captioned cat pictures existed for years before anyone monetised them. They circulated on 4chan, where Saturday had become the day for posting cats, and on the Something Awful forums, although posts on fast-moving imageboards could disappear quickly. We covered the origin of that site in our piece on how 4chan was built in eight days by a 15-year-old, and the mythology that grew out of the Caturday ritual in our piece on Ceiling Cat, Basement Cat and the imageboard religion of lolcats. The visual grammar, white Impact type with a black outline, came from a wider tradition we broke down in our guide to the image macro.
Imageboards were fleeting, but screenshots, reposts, forums and blogs could preserve their jokes. Communities can develop conventions without an official academy. What Cheezburger added was a conspicuous place to browse, submit and rate examples. It was less the invention of cat-speak than a very successful display window. The cats finally had a shopfront, and naturally they demanded cheeseburgers.
January 11, 2007: The Day the Joke Got an Editor
On January 11, 2007, Eric Nakagawa, a blogger in Hawaii, posted one image to a new website he had set up with Kari Unebasami. The picture was a grinning British Shorthair that had been circulating on the Something Awful forums. The caption read “I Can Has Cheezburger?” and the site took its name from the caption.
The growth was immediate. By May 2007 the site was taking up to 1.5 million hits a day, and by 2008 roughly two million page views daily. In September 2007 an investor group led by Ben Huh bought it in a deal reported by Time at around two million dollars. As Foundry’s investment announcement recounts, Huh turned the single blog into a network that eventually included FAIL Blog and Know Your Meme, raised a 30 million dollar round in January 2011 from investors including Madrona Venture Group and Foundry Group, and sold the company to Literally Media in 2016. Bravo even made a reality series about the office, called LOLwork.
The LOL Builder and 8,000 Submissions a Day
The mechanism that mattered was not the money. The LOL Builder let readers add captions to photographs and submit them; ratings gave other readers a voice too. In an April 2008 interview, Huh estimated roughly two million daily page views and 8,000 submissions. A large audience was making and judging cat jokes together. Those figures describe the site’s scale, not a measured cause of linguistic change.
You can think of that loop as a language academy by accident: people write, other people react, and successful forms get reused. But the metaphor has limits. Cheezburger was not the only classroom, and an acceptance rate cannot prove that the site alone standardised LOLspeak. The interesting thing is the shared sense of what sounds cat-like. Nobody had to pass an exam. They could still fail the vibe check.
The Rules of LOLspeak, Reverse Engineered
An early public argument that LOLspeak had a grammar came from Anil Dash, in âCats Can Has Grammarâ on April 23, 2007, roughly three months after Cheezburger launched. His argument was elegant and hard to refute: you can do it wrong. He pointed at a caption reading “I are dunecat. I controls the spice” and noted that it simply was not right, in a way that any regular reader could feel but nobody had explained. A system where competent users agree that a given output is malformed is a system with rules. Dash called it a kitty pidgin, and the label stuck for years.
Spelling Was Phonetic, Not Random
The respellings follow sound, not chaos. “Hi” becomes “hai”, “bye” becomes “bai”, “my” becomes “mai”. The repeated treatment of the same sound gives readers an orthographic pattern to recognise, even though individual captions vary. “Cheeseburger” loses its silent letters and picks up a z for the voiced consonant it actually contains, giving “cheezburger”. Plurals and verb endings that sound voiced get spelled with z rather than s. This is the same principle behind eye dialect in printed fiction, where a writer respells standard pronunciations to signal that the speaker is not standard.
The Verbs Broke Familiar Rules on Purpose
“I can has” is the signature, and it is a specific violation rather than a general one. English modals take the bare infinitive, so “can have” is required and “can has” is impossible. LOLspeak inflects the verb after the modal anyway. Elsewhere it does the opposite and strips agreement where English demands it. Past tenses get doubled, so a verb already marked for past gets marked again. The copula, the verb “to be”, gets dropped in some positions and over-applied in others. These recurring tricks make the style recognisable. They are conventions to play with, not a single compulsory grammar followed by every caption.
Templates Did the Rest
The most productive structure was a fill-in frame borrowed from online gaming trash talk: “I’m in ur X, Ving ur Y.” The frame carried the joke and the writer supplied two nouns and a verb. Other recurring forms include “Oh hai”, the sign-off “kthxbai”, “Do Not Want”, “Monorail Cat” and “Oh Noes”. A reader who knew ten templates could caption almost any photograph, which is exactly the property that makes a format spread. The stretched-cat lineage we traced in the history of Longcat worked the same way, one shape reused until it became a character.
Linguists Checked, and LOLspeak Held Up
In 2011 Jordan Lefler submitted a master’s thesis at Louisiana State University titled âI can has thesis? A linguistic analysis of lolspeakâ, supervised by Mary J. Brody. Lefler treated lolspeak as an internet dialect of English used together with images of cats, and built a multi-modal transcription method, grounded in Grounded Theory, that recorded the caption and the photograph together rather than pulling the text out on its own. The data came from I Can Has Cheezburger itself. The analysis worked through parts of speech, consonants and vowels, the copula and the determiner system, and documented the hi/bye/my to hai/bai/mai correspondence as a rule rather than an accident.
The useful distinction is between deliberate language play and a contact language developed for communication between groups. âKitty pidginâ is a funny label; it is not a literal account of humans establishing trade with cats. Writers manipulate forms they and their audience recognise, and the joke depends on that recognition. The mistakes are part of the performance.
The same year, Lauren Gawne and Jill Vaughan presented “I can haz language play: The construction of language and identity in LOLspeak” at the 42nd Australian Linguistic Society conference in Canberra, held from 1 to 4 December 2011. Their paper, published in the conference proceedings in 2012, describes the norms as collaboratively constructed and that fluent users could subvert them on purpose for effect, which only works if the norms exist in the first place. Writing good LOLspeak was a membership test. The word âlolcatâ itself appeared in the American Dialect Society’s 2007 Most Creative voting, behind âGooglegängerâ.
Older Ancestors and Foreign Cousins
Treating a cat as the speaker of playful English was not invented in 2007, and the internet did not invent written dialects built for fun.
Krazy Kat Did Eye Dialect for Thirty Years
George Herriman drew Krazy Kat from 1913 to 1944, and gave the cat a speech register assembled out of New Orleans speech influences, plus French, Spanish, Yiddish and African American slang, all rendered in aggressive phonetic spelling. Krazy sighs “li’l ainjil” for “little angel” and “li’l dahlink” for “little darling”. Herriman also differentiated his characters by register, giving Officer Pupp a bombastic, alliterative delivery that no reader would confuse with Krazy’s. That is a comic strip doing what lolcats did ninety years later: a cat speaks, and the deformation of the spelling is the character.
Russia Built Its Own Version, and a Politician Joined the Joke
The Russian-speaking internet developed a parallel written variety with no cats in it at all. Padonkaffsky jargon, also called Olbanian, came out of a Runet subculture that called itself the padonki. Its defining feature is deliberate misspelling applied systematically, modelled on the phonetic realities that standard Russian orthography hides: unstressed vowels reduce, consonants devoice at the end of words, so “avtor” (author) is written “afftar” and “oshibka” (error) becomes “ashibka”. The most famous single item is “preved”, a respelling of the greeting “privet”. It went mainstream far beyond its origins, and Dmitry Medvedev joked about teaching Olbanian. A December 2007 report quoting him places the remark before he became president.
The parallel is useful, but not exact. Both varieties turn conspicuous departures from standard spelling into signs of belonging. Sound-based respelling is one technique; deliberate distortions and recognisable catchphrases are others. What looks like an error from outside the group can be precisely the point inside it.
LOLCODE: When the Dialect Became a Programming Language
The joke even acquired executable form. In May 2007, four months after Cheezburger launched, Adam T. Lindsay of the Computing Department at Lancaster University in the United Kingdom released LOLCODE, an esoteric programming language built entirely out of lolcat vocabulary. In the LOLCODE 1.2 specification, a program opens with HAI and a version number and closes with KTHXBYE. Output uses VISIBLE; input uses GIMMEH.
That does not prove LOLspeak had one fixed grammar: a programming-language designer can assign meaning to any chosen symbols. LOLCODE takes familiar-looking cat-speak and gives it exact technical rules. The compiler needs a specification even when the programmer is laughing. Especially then.
From LOLspeak to DoggoLingo
LOLspeak also went to print. Gotham Books published I Can Has Cheezburger?: A LOLcat Colleckshun in 2008, credited to Professor Happycat, collecting around 200 images with a guide to the finer points of the dialect. It reached the New York Times bestseller list in January 2009, and a second book, “How To Take Over The Wurld: An LOLcat Guide 2 Winning”, followed the same year. The joke had become a product you could put on a shelf. Whether that feels like triumph or the beginning of uncoolness depends on how protective you are of your internet cats.
DoggoLingo offers a useful comparison. In a 2017 interview, linguist Gretchen McCulloch distinguished people talking about pets from captions written in the animal’s voice. Words such as doggo, pupper and woofer let users talk affectionately as themselves. She suggested this could make them easier to carry into speech. That is a plausible explanation of their appeal, not proof that one dialect killed another.
The other factor is platform. Different platforms give jokes different routes to spread. A curated blog, a Tumblr reblog chain and a stream of short videos do not reward exactly the same forms. Cheezburger helped popularise LOLspeak; it did not own everyone’s way of writing it. The doge meme and its “such wow” phrasing arrived through a completely different route, and the arc from there to the present is laid out in our full timeline of cat memes and in the wider history of internet memes.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is LOLspeak actually a language?
It is better described here as playful English than as an independent language. The research documents patterns and community expectations: captions can sound recognisably like LOLspeak, or miss the joke. Calling it language play does not mean it is random or unworthy of study.
Who invented “I can has cheezburger”?
The caption was already circulating on the Something Awful forums before the website existed. Eric Nakagawa and Kari Unebasami launched the site around that image on January 11, 2007. The original photographer of the grinning British Shorthair has never been definitively established.
Why is it “cheezburger” and not “cheeseburger”?
Because the respelling follows pronunciation. The s in “cheese” is pronounced as a voiced z, and the silent e carries no sound, so both get corrected to match speech. The same logic explains hai, bai and mai. It is phonetic transcription played for laughs, not a typing error.
Did other languages have their own LOLspeak?
The closest parallel is Padonkaffsky jargon, or Olbanian, on the Russian-speaking internet. It applies systematic phonetic misspelling to standard Russian, producing forms like “afftar” for “avtor” and the famous greeting “preved” for “privet”. It grew from a message board subculture rather than from cat photographs, but the mechanism and the in-group function are the same.
Does anyone still write in LOLspeak?
It remains a recognisable style that people can reuse, including nostalgically. The classic image-macro format strongly evokes the late-2000s web, but a format becoming old-fashioned is not the same as its users disappearing. There is no linguistic death certificate for âI can hasâ.
The Cat Had a Grammar All Along
LOLspeak is worth remembering for something beyond the cats. It lets us watch people build, recognise and bend shared conventions in public. Cheezburger made an especially visible stage for that process, while forums, blogs and other communities kept the joke moving. Think of an academy with no entrance exam, no official dictionary and an unreasonable number of applicants demanding lunch. The grammar was playful. The sense of belonging was real.
