Rebuilding Babel?

As a continuation of the article on languages, I thought it might be a good idea to go the other direction and put the focus on a new language that is emerging on the internet. Both because despite the disappearance of some minority languages there is apparently still space for new ones and because it's found exclusively in english, the new super-lingua franca.

I'm neither an initiated gamer nor skilled hacker, but I think it'd be fair to say I know enough of internet's diverse sub culture-lingo to survive on IRC or the high-speed tag-chat in a game of CS.
However, lately I've come to realize that this type of language is something that the main part of the population is completely unaware of so I've compiled a little guide for those who are curious.

On accents
First it needs to be mentioned that different kind of groups have different styles in writing, you could even call it accents or dialects. However, as with everything on the internet things tend to blend and mix as people cross over from different areas to other so to try and build a taxonomy of all the diverse differences would be pointless.

Bad english and QWERTY
There are two main reasons why this new language has been created. One is the fact that there is a strong sense among members of these groups - just like in all youth-based sub cultures - to alienate them self from 'normal people' (such as their mom and dad).
This also has a practical reason on the warez-scene, where the releases from different groups are often surrounded by big secrecy and anonymity. Just like street-slang is often used to cover criminal activities such as drug trafficking (here's a hilarious list of street terms for drugs compiled by our friends at the White house), the internet-slang works as a way to complicate back-tracking by RIAA or similar organizations.
The other reason is simply bad spelling. A large part can be accounted for by the fact that it's a highly international scene where most people don't have english as their first language. It also shows the low level english-skills among the native speakers.
However, the main part is the misspellings that occur when people just don't have the time to spell check, or even care (mostly it's an act of simple laziness). Obvious mistakes has, after being repeated enough times, been accepted as alternative spellings of the word. A factor that has a huge influence of this development is the layout of the keyboard (a good example is "pwned" where people simply hit the p instead of the o enough times to start using that instead).

1337
One huge influence on the internet lingo is "leet" or "leetspeak". To explain it I choose to quote the extensive dictionary of linuxreviews.org:

"Leet, usually written as "1337" in Leetspeak, is an online culture and/or attitude, as well as a language code, among the Internet population. The word itself is derived phonetically from the word "elite", and is a cipher, or cryptic form of spelling replacing letters with numbers, symbols, and other letters that look or sound alike. "

The actual use is fairly liberal and nobody can really be accused of misspelling in leet, it's "anything goes" more or less.

h4x0rz and n00bs
It's a common misunderstanding that the language used in general chats or on IM apps, such as "u" for you, "4" for for (lol) and "prolly" for probably, is the same thing as "hacker" language. This is definitely not the case as the average web-teen wouldn't understand most of the more advanced slang, and the more hardcore-users despise few things more than "noobspeak".


A quick dictionary:
w00t - it's derivation is not clear, but its generally used to express happiness or excitement
wtf - "what the fuck"
suxxor/roxxor - "sucks"/"rocks"
pwn, pwned, pwnage - comes from the expression "to own somebody", ie when you're kicking somebody's ass in a game or when a hacker has taken over a computer
teh - "the"
noob, n00b - "newbie", somebody who is new to something, usually gaming, programming or just using internet
rofl, lmao, roflmao - "rolling on the floor laughing", "laughing my ass off", "rolling on the floor laughing my ass off". When the more famous "lol" doesn't cut it
haxor (h4x0r) - a hacker
omg, omfg - "oh my god", "oh my fucking god"
stfu - shut the fuck up
pron - "porn", used to make sure your mom doesn't suspect what you're downloading so much of
fsck - originally a commando to control the file system integrity in an Unix environment but also used instead of "fuck" in IRC channels where the word is forbidden and bots automatically kick users out when using it