LOLspeak is a complex and systematic reimagining of the English language. It is most often associated with the popular, productive and long-lasting internet meme ‘LOLcats’. This style of English is characterised by the simultaneous playful manipulation of multiple levels of language in order to perform an authentic ‘cat’ voice, and serves both as an entertaining in-group practice and as a cultural index which is recruited in the construction of identity.

Using community-generated web content as a corpus, we analyse some of the common speech play strategies (Sherzer 2002) used in LOLspeak, which include morphological reanalysis, atypical sentence structure and lexical playfulness. The linguistic variety that emerges from these manipulations displays collaboratively constructed norms and tendencies providing a standard which may be meaningfully adhered to or subverted by users.

Building on this, we use Bucholtz and Hall’s (e.g. 2005) interactional and ethnographic approach to linguistic analysis to examine how the speech play strategies used by participants allow for the simultaneous construction of two identities: firstly the identities of the cats that they claim to be speaking for, and secondly their own identity as savvy members of an online community of practice (Jones & Schieffelin 2009).