fanilect

English

Etymology

Blend of fan +‎ familect coined by linguist Cynthia Gordon.

Noun

fanilect (plural fanilects)

1. (linguistics, fandom slang) The lect of a fandom, including in-group slang, phrases, and expressions.

   Hyponym: bronyspeak

   • 2023 February 3, Pia Ceres, “Quoting Taylor Swift Lyrics Is an Actual Linguistic Thing”, in Wired‎^[1], San Francisco, C.A.: Condé Nast Publications, →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 2023-05-19:

     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. […] If a familect exists within a family unit, then an online community’s fanilect expands exponentially, like invisible strings across distance and time.

   • 2024 November 22, Matthew Jordon, Victoria Morton, “Move aside Shakespeare. Taylor Swift is the one we should all be studying”, in Toronto Star‎^[2]:

     Taylor’s use of language is so precise that Swifties speak in their own “fanilect”.

   • 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).

   • For more quotations using this term, see Citations:fanilect.