tumblr linguists pls explain why ‘you’ sometimes needs to be ‘u’ and ‘u’ needs to be ‘you’ and how come i will mix and match my u’s and you’s within the same post or even the same sentence
the difference between “u” and “you” is really interesting to me too, and while there haven’t been a lot of plausible conclusions drawn about variable usage of the two, i’ve observed a few things about it.
one: tumblr has, effectively, its own dialect. in fact, different part of tumblr have different variants of this dialect. usage of “you” vs “u” is a part of this dialect.
(here’s a great video on the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDPasRas5u0)
two: a key feature of the “tumblr dialect” is fluidity — tumblr posts generally maintain a very specific cadence. variable usage of “u”/”you” occurs most frequently in order to increase fluidity of speech. the pattern is generally “you” at the beginning of a statement and “u”s in the body thereof. (this pattern is relatively consistent even if there is no beginning “you”.)
three: another factor seems to be emphasis, and authorial intent. “you” is used more frequently when the subject matter is serious, or, as one person already pointed out, if the statement is intended to be forceful. alternatively, “u” has an intrinsic flippancy that speakers frequently use in conjunction with humor, irony, or sarcasm.
four: authors will vary usage of “you”/”u” in instances of repetition, in part because the “tumblr dialect” involves a minimalistic approach to punctuation. (example: “omg i was so worried about u you know”)
five: users often use “u” instead of “you” to address people they know well or feel close to, almost as a form of endearment. (example: “i love u”, “are u ok”, etc.) because “you” carries with it a forcefulness or seriousness, “u” is used more frequently in casual, affectionate exchanges between friends.
six: users use “u” more often if they use other such abbreviations in the same post.
the key difference seems to be that “u” — as a single letter — feels diminutive, casual, and cute, in comparison to the full word “you”, which feels more serious, more professional, or more severe. though the have the same meaning on tumblr, their different connotations can be chalked up to their different visual presentations.
somebody who’s a more skilled linguist than i am should pick this up tbh, would love to hear about any conclusions that have been drawn about this
I am not a linguist, but I also note that some people use the “You” instead of “u” when “ya” could also be used like “I like u, ya know?” and it would be perfectly understandable like that too.
imho the internet has effectively brought back the formal/informal ‘you’ that was phased out of the english language hundreds of years ago, albeit in a purely text-based system (i have my own ideas about text-based language being the language of the future but i won’t get into that here)
u takes the place of a less formal and less polite pronoun- you wouldn’t say ‘u’ in an email to the president, but you’d say that shit online or to friends and family
conversely, ‘you’ has evolved to be more serious- receiving a ‘fuck you’ text is way more alarming than if it says ‘fuck u’
TL;DR- the internet allowed formal/informal you to re-evolve in englishAll of this analysis is quite insightful – no need to feel like you’re not a skilled enough linguist! I feel like I recently read another tumblr post about this same phenomenon though – maybe allthingslinguistic had one? But I just looked and couldn’t find it.
Yay for cool linguistic analysis of internet-speak 🙂
I haven’t analyzed this before, but I’ve been watching it. See also this popular text post on the same topic.
I don’t think it’s exactly the same as the informal/formal distinction that we used to have with thou/you, but that’s not shocking: even within the same distinction in the same language, different dialects and time periods can have different subtleties within a general “formality” distinction. For example, with tu/vous in French, Quebec and France use them differently, and France a couple hundred years ago used them yet a third way.
So hey, modern internet residents are dealing with a pretty different set of social circumstances from people in Chaucerian or even Shakespearian England, there are different subtleties in formality. Here’s my first attempt at describing the social functions of “u”:
1. “It’s shorter or faster to type (and I don’t care if prescriptive authorities like it).”
2. “I’ve been told this is how People On The Internet talk to each other.” This is the use that gets satirized in this xkcd comic. It’s found among older, less-but-still-somewhat internet-savvy people, so it’s kind of internet culture but kind of not.
3. “I’m using it to indicate my membership in group (1) or (2) for a period of time. But I’m also using it to indicate that I’m aware these two groups exist, and positioning myself relative to internet culture with how I use and don’t use it.” I think this is the interesting subtle usage that these posts are drawing our attention to, although there are probably further patterns that we could get from a corpus.
So I think “u” can indicate a variety of things from internet culture. It’s not just “u” vs “you”, but those two have an advantage that you have to use one or the other. Someone might avoid emoticons or abbreviations like lol or wtf for any number of reasons, so there isn’t an obvious absence when you don’t use them, but if you want to use a second person (especially singular) pronoun, you’re forced to choose between “u” and “you”. (Leaving aside explicitly plural pronouns like “y’all” and “you guys”, although I do have a vague impression that “u” is better as singular than plural.)
The most similar items would be other rebus-based common word replacements, i.e “are” vs ”r”, “to/two/too” vs ”2″, and maybe even “see” vs ”c”. But I haven’t really seen people using c in the last 10 or so years and “r” and “2″ also seem rarer than “u”. (“R” is probably the most common of these three, especially when it’s in the same utterance as “u”, which might be a style matching thing? Does anyone say “u are” or “you r”? “u r” or “u are” seem okay to me but “you r” seems odd.)
It’s still an open question why “u”/”you” is the most productive, but maybe it harkens back to the idea that expressing formality in pronouns is more familiar to us historically/cross-linguistically.
This is endlessly fascinating to me. (Note: I’m a nerd, obviously.)