R U TXT CRZY? The Witty World
of Multilingual Texting
How does a lover of French cinema invite a friend to the movies using just 11 characters? The savvy texter would type: “6né 2m1? A tt!”, which represents: “Ciné demain? À toute à l’heure!” (“Movie tomorrow? See you soon!”).
Around the world, users of text messaging (a.k.a. SMS or Short Message Service) have developed a wonderfully witty linguistic subculture that is arguably changing the way we use written language.
In any language, getting your point across in a restricted number of characters, as required by text messages, requires wit and creativity. Roman language texters commonly take advantage of the language-specific pronunciations of individual letters and numbers, morphing them into words or approximations of words, such as “c u 2nite” (“see you tonight”) and “l8r” (“later”).
In Spanish, similar combinations are “salu2” for “saludos” (both “hello” and “goodbye”), “mx” for “mucho” (“much”), “100pre” for “siempre” (“always”) or “a2” for “adios” (“good-bye”).
Italian friends looking for each other in a crowded plaza might type “dv6” for “dove sei?” (“Where are you?”). Or, star-crossed lovers on opposite ends of Verona would write “mmt+” for “mi manchi tantissimo” (“I miss you so much!”).
Text abbreviations are a boon to German speakers, who would otherwise have to type some of the longest words in language. A few of the simpler examples include: “8ung!” for “Achtung!” (“Careful!”), “AWS” for “Auf Wiedersehen” (“good-bye”), “BS” for “Bis Später” (“see you later”) or the very cool “BBB” for “Bis bald, baby” (“See you soon baby”).
In French, too, common expressions are abbreviated, such as “MDR” for “mort de rire” (a translation of “LOL”, which stands for Laugh Out Loud) or “PDP” for “pas de problème” (“no worries”). Using letters and numbers together, a Francophone with a fantastic suggestion might punch out “g1nd2kdo” for the lengthy “J’ai une idée de cadeau!” (“I’ve got the best idea!”).
Outside the world of Roman alphabets, numbers and symbols, rather than letters, can step in to replace characters for simpler expressions. In Chinese, for example, characters take up more bytes per character, which leaves numbers as the more economical choice. So, Chinese texters use the number 8, pronounced “ba” to cleverly say good-bye: They double it by typing “88”, which stands for “ba ba”, which sounds like “bye-bye”.
In a world where less is usually more, take advantage of the witty world of texting to save your self some time and effort — wherever you are. “tt 88 a2 BBB mmt+” LOL!!
Contact us to share your multilingual texting shortcuts — and to discuss your localization needs.
