The chapter ’#StatsWithCats’ shows some statistical methods to interpret and visualise the cat-related online data. The selected sociolinguistic variables are the social media platforms and the cat account types. The chapter takes frequencies and crosstabs to describe linguistic variation across four social media platforms and four cat account types. The selected linguistic variables refer to the choices of non-meowlogisms and meowlogisms on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Youtube as well as in collective, for-profit celebrity, working-for-cause, and individual cat accounts. Additionally, the chapter uses social network analysis to illustrate the networks in cat-related digital spaces.

The chapter ’Going on Pawtrol’ describes how to conduct linguistic research using the cat examples from the original research done for this book. It looks at methodological issues, like research design, research methods, sampling methods, data collection, wordlists, and surveys. The chapter also discusses ethics in relation to the protection of research participants and the research, touching on the laws in place to protect people’s privacy and data and the ethical guidelines established for researchers.

The chapter ’Linguistic Scratching Posts’ looks at how to analyse the collected data to describe a linguistic variety. Taking a dialectological approach, it shows lexical, morphological, and orthographical variation in a list of cat-related keywords. It also uses the categories of the feline purrspective and the human perspective, which illustrate the semantic variation in cat-related digital spaces. All the categories are listed with examples from the data. To show the vastness of the number of users and posts we are dealing with, the chapter provides some statistics for the four social media platforms from which the data was collected: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube.

The chapter ’The Feline Territory of Language’ shows us how we can approach online language variation with dialectology and outlines the steps to take for a dialectological description of a regional language variety, ranging from dialect data collection to dictionary-making. Using cat-related headwords and survey questions as examples, we look at how the data is collected and presented in the Survey of English Dialects and the Survey of Anglo-Welsh Dialects. The chapter then moves on to dialect lexicography, with cats illustrating the approaches of the EDD, the OED, and the Urban Dictionary, leading us into online dialectology and its use of computers to collect, analyse, and display the data. The last section of the chapter covers phonetics, including its acoustic and articulatory branches. Instead of the usually studied human sounds, however, it takes cat vocalisations to illustrate what to do in phonetics.

The chapter ’Multimeowdality’ looks at the interplay of textual and visual elements in social media and approaches multimodality in computer-mediated communication (CMC) and computer-mediated discourse (CMD). Digital discourse has evolved from text-only discourse to multimodal interactions involving text, audio, video, and graphics. The chapter shows the CMC modes and semiotic modes used in multimodal interaction. Based on examples from cat-related digital spaces, it applies the faceted classification tool and the CMDA tool to describe communication on the interactive multimodal platforms. The chapter describes the various visual elements, such as photos, videos, memes, meme-like photos, GIFs, emoticons, emoji, and stickers, and discusses their functions in discourse.

The chapter ’Virtual Furever Homes’ shows the background of digital spaces and community building by using examples from cat-related digital spaces. The evolution of participatory culture and the development of technology have influenced the way we form online networks and communicate with each other. The chapter explains the concepts of virtual communities, communities of practice, light communities, and affinity spaces. As digital spaces form around narratives, it uses the shared story of the mediated narrative approach to categorise the types of cat accounts that make up the cat-related digital spaces.

The chapter ’The Cativerse’ introduces us to the digital world in which we find cats in various ways and modes. We go into the underlying reasons for feline success, not only on the Internet and especially on social media but also in the offline world. We look at the historical roles of cats in our culture, at biological and psychological explanations for the cat effect on us, and at the feline presence in popular culture. This chapter sets the scene for the linguistic description of the purrieties we encounter on social media.

The chapter ’Da Kittehz’ focusses on semiotics and syntax with examples from LOLcats and LOLspeak. The section on semiotics shows us the difference between image macros (memes) and vernacular photos, both of which are present in the cat-related digital spaces. The chapter continues with a description of LOLspeak as a special internet language variety (SILV) in relation to pidgins, play language, and ludlings. Based on the methods of the existing studies on LOLspeak, it analyses the spelling, vocabulary, and grammar of LOLspeak. The final section shows us more cat-related language varieties that have developed in the cat-related digital spaces on the Internet, like Hambspeak and other cat-inspired idiolects.

The chapter ’Meowlogisms’ explains morphological processes by using meowlogisms, which are a typical linguistic feature of cat-related digital spaces. These are created with cat-inspired morphemes and lexemes – called ’meowphemes’ here – with which people create new words to give their communication a feline spin. The chapter also looks at the reasons we consider certain words funny and discusses the concepts of humour, iconicity, and funniness in relation to meowlogisms. Denoting the feline perspective, meowlogisms are also present in the linguistic landscapes and are, thus, a feature that can be studied when it comes to the public spaces around us.

The chapter ’Meow and More’ lead us to the sociolinguistic concepts of code, code-switching, bilingualism, and multilingualism. It describes transnational communication, polylanguaging, translanguaging, and networked multilingualism by using cat-related examples, going over the technological aspects of computer-mediated communication to show how technology affects multilingual online discourse. The chapter also illustrates how we use language to construct our identity in the cat-related digital spaces.

The chapter ’Cattitude and Purrception’ goes once more into the set-up of the research surveys and sets them in the context of sociolinguistic attitude and perception studies. The two surveys were designed to find out the reasons why people participate in cat-related digital spaces and what they think about the linguistic variations they encounter there. The interest of this chapter lies in how the answers of the respondents are analysed, categorised, and interpreted. Switching from the human identity to the cat identity online brings with it a switch in language variety, with the purrieties working as a recognisable indicator for identity.