Katja Politt: The book is not about cats alone, but also about science. It introduces many important concepts relevant to studying and describing language empirically and even provides a clawssary of them. In a nutshell: What is the most important takeaway one can gain for engaging with phenomena like purrieties in a scientific way?
Edith Podhovnik: Good question. I think, the most important takeaway is that looking at language is fun and that we can look at whatever phenomenon we want – as long as we know what we doing and how we are doing it in science. If we are interested in a phenomenon, let’s go for it. And if it is a fun subject, there is no reason not to research it. On the contrary, it makes science more relatable and approachable for a wider audience. I had a few eyebrows raised at me when I said I was looking at online cats – as if online cats were not a science-worthy subject. To be honest, that made me even more determined to research cat-related digital spaces.
The fun side of cats aside, it is important to do a proper scientific study with a proper research design and methodology. At the same time, the more theoretical approach to science and scientific thinking is nothing to be afraid of. I have been teaching undergraduate students in research-related classes and have been supervising Bachelor’s and Master’s theses, so I have encountered students’ questions about research first-hand and I always try to take away their fears of doing something wrong.
Another aim for me was to offer a comprehensive linguistic description of the purrietie, in the same way as we would describe a language or a dialect that exists in the offline world. It’s like a linguistic treasure trove: we find examples that show us how language works in general, like phonetics/phonology, semantics, syntax, and pragmatics. We can also go into more specialised fields, like computer-mediated communication. Language in the cat-related digital spaces is a living breathing thing: purrieties are evolving and changing, and that is fascinating.
I also show that online cats are not just a shortlived Internet fad but are part of our online culture. For some people, online cats might just be a silly social endeavour, but I have always thought that there is more behind the online cats than just the memes and funny cat videos. This is also what I wanted to bring across.
One final point I would like to mention is that we can do our research also on our own without, say, institutional support. There are open source tools out there. I have been working on the purrieties as an independent scholar in my free time. Admittedly, this is hard sometimes, but absolutely worth it.
Katja Politt: During the process of writing, how has the book changed from what you had originally planned, e.g. by feedback from colleagues, cats, and your survey respondents? You seem to have made a great effort in including feedback, e.g. by including the constructive additions of Purr Reviewer 2.
Edith Podhovnik: Before I started writing, I had a clear outline of what I wanted to include in which chapter, say dialectology and lexicology should be covered in Chapter “The Feline Territory of Language” and the attitude studies should be in Chapter “Cattitude and Purrception”. There was quite a lot of preparation before I started writing, and it took some time to create a good workable outline.
Additionally, I was doing fieldwork to get the data: I collected data – scraping from social media and communicating with cat account holders. This is a cyclical process: we analyse a phenomenon, get feedback and more input from the people actually producing the data, we go back to our analysis of the data, then back to the respondents, and so on.
I received really good feedback on the first draft I submitted: additional resources to include, then the narrative approach to social media to complement my chapter on computer-mediated communication; I had inconsistencies in style as my draft was too academic in some parts and too informal in others. Well, and there was Purr Reviewer 2, who was only happy when I included him in the chapter. [Purr Reviewer 2 is sitting next to me on the radiator while I am writing this. Apparently he is happy because he does not use the keyboard on his way across my desk],
The reviewers were always very encouraging and made really helpful suggestions. Based on their comments, I restructured the book. For example, it was not clear why I had a whole chapter devoted the real language of cat, and the reviewers felt that it did not quite fit in with the other chapters. That made me think about my reasons why I had included this chapter in the first place. I scrapped that chapter in the final version and kept only the bit on cat phonetics. I used the cat sounds as an introduction to phonetics in the chapter on phonetics/phonology – one reason being that I wanted to include the figure with the cat vowel chart.
Instead of the chapter on the real language of cats, I included the narrative approach that we can use to study social media, which was something I had not really touched upon in the first draft. So all the changes were geared towards filling in bits and pieces to come up with a fuller picture of the cat-related digital spaces.
I also asked authors whose data I included in my book to check if I could use their data for my book. Even though their data is freely available on github, I wanted to let them know that I was looking at their data for my own purposes and to have them give their OK to the context in which I was including their data. They also plotted some data visualisations for me, which I am really grateful for.
Katja Politt: The book features chapters on phonetics/phonology, meowphology, semantics, pragmatics, and sociolinguistics. As a researcher, which CATegory here is your favourite to research and analyse?
Edith Podhovnik: I like all the CATegories, to be honest. They were all fun to research and to write about. And going through the cat-inspired language data was very easy to do because the purrieties and the cat-related digital spaces are lighthearted and fun. Showing the underlying linguistic processes by using the many feline examples I had come across in my research was just entertaining.
My absolute favourite CATegory is – and has always been – dialectology, I had specialised in social dialectology in my PhD, and I wanted to apply the same approach to purrieties. I just love dialects in all their variations, and with the purrieties I could study online language variation. Additionally, I was so happy when I found all the lovely dialect expressions in the English Dialect Dictionary and in the Survey of English Dialects. Well, it is phonetics and lexicology really.
When I went through the literature in the respective fields, I found that cats had already sneaked in. That meant that I could include cat-related linguistic quotes and cat-related material other linguists had used in the respective context. So, in addition to the linguistic content, I was on the lookout for cats. I am still doing that: checking if authors use cats in one way or another in their studies.
I would also like to mention that I love linguistic fieldwork. Going out to people and asking them language-related questions is something that I really like because I am fascinated by their answers.
Katja Politt: Would you say that there is also a way to describe semeowtics from a purrieties point of view?
Edith Podhovnik: Oh yes, definitely. Looking at semiotics with cats makes absolute sense – at least to me – because social media is full of cat pictures and videos. We have the memes, we have the vernacular photos, the cat gifs, cat emoji, cat stickers, cat videos, and the like. In the offline world, when we take into account the linguistic landscapes, we find cats, too: on T-shirts, on mugs, on various other consumer goods. Cats are used in advertising because they convey certain messages for us.
People are using purrieties, which means purrieties are not an isolated phenomenon but quite widespread. And they occur in other languages, too, like in French or German.
Katja Politt: Is there anything you would have loved to add to your book that you have come across since submoewtting [submitting] it?
Edith Podhovnik: Definitely. I keep coming across more examples of meowlogisms, I have found a new meowpheme (‘chonk’ as in ‘to dechonkify”, which means for a big cat to lose weight), I have collected more contributions in the digital spaces of academics and their cats, there are more books (of the fiction kind) featuring cats). As a dialectologist, I want to record all the different cat-related word formations, so I am still doing that.
I also find more meowlogisms in languages other than English, and I enjoy adding cat-inspired varieties in, say, German, French, Italian, and Russian, to my ever expanding cat-related linguistic repertoire. As the book is already submitted, I write posts about meowlogisms and purrieties in my research blog (https://meowfactor.hypotheses.org).
CaMP Anthropology 