“That spelling tho”: A sociolinguistic study of the nonstandard form of though in a corpus of Reddit comments

Abstract

AbstractTho, the nonstandard spelling of though which was proposed by American spelling reformers in the 19th century, is making a comeback. In 2013, internet memes such as that backflip tho gave a boost to the shortened form. This sociolinguistic study investigates the use of tho in RedditGender, a 19 million-word corpus of comments posted by 1044 Reddit users. First, concordance lines generated from the whole corpus were analyzed in order to compare the use of tho with the meme and the standard spelling. Then, regression analysis was conducted with a sample of the corpus, containing only complete cases. Results show that tho is rarely used in the meme construction that contributed to popularize it, and that it appears more often as an adverb than as a conjunction. They also seem to indicate that the use of tho is correlated with gender and race. Most frequent users are black males. This suggests that the shortened spelling is not simply a way to save time when typing, and that it is not semantically equivalent to though. It seems to be a marker of affiliation with a social group and of familiarity with internet subcultures.