‘Cam’ versus ‘Cambs’ – a tale of two Cambridges

Kitty Liu

How do you shorten ‘Cambridge’?

For a city and institution that absorbs so much of our intellectual and social energies, ‘Cambridge’ is a rather clunky word to write – it has nine letters even though it’s only two syllables long. Among young people at least, it’s rare to see ‘Cambridge’ being written out in full in texts or on social media. The form ‘Cam’ is near-ubiquitous for Cambridge University’s student population, as in “who’s back at cam this term”, “cam is running weekly covid tests for students”, or portmanteaus like Camfess. One might also occasionally see ‘Camb’ or ‘Cambs’, but what many students may not know is that ‘Cambs’ is the more common shortening for young people who grew up in Cambridge but don’t attend Cambridge University.

I myself went to secondary school in Cambridge, and ‘Cambs’ was what everyone used – “there’s a train to cambs at 10”, “the cambs parks are dark at night”. It was very jarring for me to come to Cambridge University and find that all the Facebook pages and my new university friends use ‘Cam’, as I’d never seen anyone around me use it before. But now, after my first year here, I catch myself naturally using ‘Cam’ and wondering if I should revert back to ‘Cambs’ when I text my school friends.

Is there a general association between using ‘Cam’ or ‘Cambs’ and the ‘town versus gown’ split in this city? I decided to run a poll on Instagram, since my Instagram followers are in near-equal parts from both school and university, and are mostly around my age. I got people to vote on whether they use ‘Cam’ or ‘Cambs’, and when the poll closed after 24 hours, I then tallied whether each voter was a Cambridge University student or had lived there before university. The results (Table 1) skew significantly towards an association – namely that Cambridge University students are more likely to use ‘Cam’ and non-students more likely to use ‘Cambs’.

Table 1. Summary of poll results; poll data vs (expected data if there was no association)
	Student	Resident	TOTAL
Cam	105 (54)	10 (61)	115
Cambs	33 (70)	114 (77)	147
TOTAL	138	124	262

During the poll’s 24-hour lifetime, I got some pretty strong responses from participants. One school friend messaged me saying “Anyone who says Cam is satanic x”, while a fellow student said “Sorry but those who answered Cambs are definitely wrong”. A few said they see both in use, but more people expressed surprise that the other variant even exists. Clearly my investigation has tapped into an existing linguistic divide.

While neither shortened form is objectively more valid than the other one, ‘Cam’ is perhaps the most transparent shortening since it is restricted to the first morpheme of ‘Cambridge’. This is likely also enforced by communication from the university, since “cam” appears in all University of Cambridge websites and email addresses. There are more possible derivations for the form ‘Cambs’. ‘Cambs’ is often also used for ‘Cambridgeshire’, as in “South Cambs District”, so this prior familiarity may be why people started using ‘Cambs’ to refer to the city as well as (but distinct from) the county. Either way, ‘Cambs’ is an accepted shortened form in British English, with the -s being analogous to shortened forms like ‘soz’ for ‘sorry’ or ‘Babs’ for ‘Barbara’. Keeping the ‘b’ in ‘Cambs’ may also aid the visual recognition of ‘Cambs’ as being related to ‘Cambridge’, since letters with ascenders and descenders are more visually distinctive, and shortened forms of ‘Cambridge’ are only really used in writing. Phonology may also play a role in the presence of ‘b’. ‘Cam’ has a short ‘a’ (/æ/) despite the full form ‘Cambridge’ having a diphthong ‘a’ ( /ei/), and since English vowels are more likely to be short before consonant clusters, the ‘b’ may act as an orthographic signal for the change in vowel quality and duration. In any case, regardless of how they arose, ‘Cam’ and ‘Cambs’ are clearly the normative shortened forms for ‘Cambridge’ among Cambridge University students and local residents respectively.

Nor is ‘Cam’ the only lingo that has been cultivated among the Cambridge students – there are also such popularised terms as ‘Orgasm Bridge’ and ‘Mainsbury’s’. As much as they identify Cambridge landmarks that all residents know and use, these terms are not in use outside of the student population.

One could go so far as to say that ‘town versus gown’ in Cambridge constitutes two distinct communities of practice. In sociolinguistics, a community of practice describes a group of people with shared interests, goals, social norms, and perhaps attitudes; such sociocultural differences between communities of practice are expected to manifest as linguistic differences. A community of practice is not necessarily demarcated by geography – participants in the same online subculture can form a community of practice despite coming from different places, as do, for instance, linguistics students at a university, even though they share the physical space with other academic disciplines. In our case, those who come to Cambridge for higher education may be said to form a distinct community of practice from the day-to-day inhabitants of the city, although they occupy the same geographical region and use its associated resources. Most young people who grow up in or around Cambridge leave for higher education, while on the other hand, most students at Cambridge University do not harbour strong social networks with regular inhabitants of the city. This is especially true of the typical undergraduate age group, as Cambridge students are only here during the university term, when Cambridge residents of the same age are mostly away in other cities.

For many students, Cambridge is simply a place to study and socialise for eight weeks a term, full of aesthetically pleasing buildings and the presence of fellow students. It’s easy to forget that Cambridge University students only make up about 20% of the Cambridge population, and that Cambridge is also the year-round home of over 100,000 people. Although Cambridge may have the reputation of a university town, our student identities, experiences, and even linguistic choices only represent one side of it.