Undergrad Thesis

In 2015, as part of my BA in Linguistics from Scripps College, I wrote a thesis on the variety of English used by my friends in East Dorm at nearby Harvey Mudd College. This was a community with a strong nerd identity that members expressed by using linguistic constructions borrowed from and inspired by internet language.

Revisiting it years later, I notice that some of the linguistic phenomena that stood out about Eastspeak at the time have become increasingly popular in more mainstream usage, while others still seem strange, and still others now feel like outdated memes.

You can read it here: I Accidentally This Thesis Because East: The Influence of the Internet on Spoken Language in Eastspeak