The internet serves as an accelerant to fanilects. Because song lyrics are readily available online, they have a characteristic linguists call "persistence," meaning anyone can refer to them and reuse them.
2023 May 23, Lisa Gutierrez, quoting Brian Donovan, “Taylor Swift and her fans are such a phenomenon, this KU professor is studying them”, in The Kansas City Star[2], Kansas City, M.O.: McClatchy, →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 2023-05-23:
For instance, Swifties have their own shorthand — what linguists call a "fanilect," Donovan said.
2024 January 1, Sam Corbin, “Modern Swifties Have Transcended the Joke”, in The New York Times[3]:
Persistence may be the best explanation for Swiftie “fanilect” — Dr. Gordon’s own play on “familect,” a term for in-group speech among families.
2024, Chloe May Bond, "A Nightmare Dressed Like a Daydream: Devising a Swiftie Theory of Monstrous Femininity", thesis submitted to the University of British Columbia, page 3:
This fierce sense of communal kinship and reciprocity has also led to the production of a distinct “fanilect”, a portmanteau of “fan” and “dialect” coined by sociolinguist Cynthia Gordon to describe how fans use intertextuality to create connections with people who share their same interests (Ceres, 2023).
2024, Souha Namane & Kamar Moulai, "The Visual and Linguistic Representations of Football Tifos: The Case of Algerian Ultras", dissertation submitted to the University of Tizi Ouzou, page 67:
Also, it will be interesting to investigate the use of the English language by other fandom groups in Algeria, such as Swifties, Kpoppers, and Gamers, which belong to the new linguistic phenomenon known as the fanilect
2024 February 2, Amy Martin, “Your guide on how to talk like a Swiftie”, in The Canberra Times[4]:
According to linguistics expert and associate professor at Georgetown's college of arts and sciences Cynthia Gordon - who posted about the phenomenon on YouTube - fanilects are like a secret code.
2024 November 22, Matthew Jordon, Victoria Morton, “Move aside Shakespeare. Taylor Swift is the one we should all be studying”, in Toronto Star[5]:
Taylor’s use of language is so precise that Swifties speak in their own “fanilect”.
2024 December 4, Brieanna Charlebois, “Swift superfans descend on Vancouver for end of Eras Tour. What drives the devotion?”, in Toronto Star[6]:
Donovan said membership can be most easily observed in how the fans speak to one another, something sociologists have coined a "fanilect."
2025, Lauren Alex Hooper, “Lyrical World Building: An Exploration of Taylor Swift's Use of Intratextuality and Intertextuality”, in Christa Bentley, Kate Galloway, Paula Harper, editors, Taylor Swift: The Star, The Songs, The Fans[7], unnumbered page:
This has lead linguistics scholar Cynthia Gordon to describe Swift's lyrics as a "fanilect," a "lect" or language spoken by a group of people – in this case, those with a fandom and the "fanilect" of every fandom will be different.
2025, Sofia Rüdiger, Alex Baratta, Transnational Korean Englishes, Cambridge University Press:
We already gave an example for this, namely, the Korean word oppa (오빠; 'older brother' [used by female speakers]), which underwent semantic shift in the K-pop fanilect (which as mentioned previously found its way into the OED).
