Twitter Introduces 'Lolcat' As A New Language Setting

LOLWHA? Twitter now speaks in one of the Internet's favorite memes.

Announced in a tweet sent out on Friday from the microblogging service's main account, Twitter now lets you set your language to "LOLcat" (still in beta) in addition to English and dozens of other spoken languages.

For the uninitiated, the Lolcats "language," based on a popular Internet meme, is noted for its obvious spelling mistakes and excessive capitalization. For example, under the new Twitter setting, "language" becomes "LANGUUJ," "Home" becomes "HUM," and "location" becomes "LOCASHUN" on Twitter's page.

But Twitter's meme-savviness seems to need some work. Emil Protalinski of the Next Web critiques the language change for not staying "true to the meme," saying "it seems that most words have simply been capitalized, and some letters are dropped." Few other changes have been made to distinguish Lolcat from its base language, American English.

Wired magazine reminds us that Twitter's translation work is crowdsourced, so Lolcat could improve rapidly if users sign up for Lolcat translation work at Twitter's translation center.

Twitter isn't the the first popular website to have humorous language options. Google offers novel "languages" for some of its pages, including "Elmer Fudd," "Bork, bork, bork!," "Hacker," 'Klingon," and "Pirate." The Sims franchise, meanwhile, has made "Simlish" popular; a mix of Latin, Ukrainian, Navajo and Tagalog, it's become such a well-known part of the Sims universe that it's spawned pop song remixes and a "How To Speak Simlish" WikiHow page.