Cell phones have managed to connect people from all over the world by making communication extremely easy and accessible. Even though, they are connecting us together and internet has made it seem like we’re part of the same village, I can still see some differences in texting habits from my hometown due to some cultural differences. Not to say that it’s a completely different language, there were lots of points that were mentioned in Crystals chapter about the oddness of texting that were still valid.

At first i wanted to point out some differences in texting jargon that are used quite differently from person to person. For example, I’ve seen the hands emoji being used as begging a person for forgiveness, politely presenting something to someone or just praying for something to happen. I’ve also noticed that some people dislike when they receive a text from someone that just contains Hi or Hey. The argument is that you are wasting a text and initiating this formal back n’ forth dance that is not necessary when texting and only applies when talking. On the other hand, I know some people that use it in order to see if the other person is available at the moment in order to ask them a question or a favor.

Due to the slender look of the Arabic language and its alphabet and the variety of intonations that are commonly spoken but not written. I see people commonly using the English language to text. This makes the English language dominant in texting but it doesn’t stop people from using the English letters to write Arabic. There are many limitations to that one of which not all the Arabic letters are included in the English language which lead people to include numbers to replace the missing letters. For example, you can write my name as 3mar to compensate for the harder O sound. This following video shows how you can pronounce some of these letters and gives some examples:

I’ve noticed that when people transition away from using the number they are usually trying to get into an argument. That might be due to the inconvenience of typing the numbers because they are out of the keyboard’s way, or even that they don’t want any room for vagueness.

This difference in culture between Arabic and English made me look into other text jargon for other countries. It seems that each country has their own take to add to the mix. For Example, In Swedish people tend to take out d from some words like det which means it. This can be a point of misunderstanding since that means they. In French, mdr = Mort de rire which is basically LOL in french, In German people use thx to mean either “please” or “you’re welcome”, and in Japanese they Kaomoji’s which are way more elaborate than emoji’s or emoticons.

I hope i haven’t bored you too much…

Thanks for sticking with it.