When I first moved to Spain, a few years ago, I was sure I’d never end up writing jajaja instead of my beloved Italian ahahah – or the English hahaha, which I considered just acceptable. Quite predictably, a few months later the Spanish written laughter had become completely normal to me and I’d use it every day, sometimes even when writing in Italian.
Fast-forward to one month ago. I wake up to a weird message by a mysterious motorbike man. It says: wkwkwk. While I struggle to keep my eyes open, or at least not fall asleep again, I try to decipher the meaning of the unusual good morning text. It takes me a few minutes to remember that the night before we had a long conversation about the way people laugh in written form in different countries, and eventually decided that our favourite one was the Indonesian wkwkwk.
Today, however, one of my workmates showed me this image:
The picture gave me not only the inspiration for this post, but also a new favourite written laughter, the Thai 55555. It turns out that the number 5 in Thailand is pronounced in a way that sounds like “ha”, so the numerical laughter makes perfect sense (fun fact: the same number is pronounced as “wu” in Mandarin Chinese, so 55555 would sound like “wuwuwuwuwu”, the equivalent of “boohoo”).
Among the many different ways of expressing amusement, I was struck by the Japanese www (not to be confused with World Wide Web…) and the Brazilian rsrsrs, an abbreviation of the word risos (laughs).
The different acronyms used to indicate laughter are similarly interesting. For instance, the famous English LOL (which, by the way, is an actual word in Dutch and means “fun”) translates to MDR in French (“Mort De Rire”, which means “dying of laughter”).
If you want to find out more about written laughter around the world, these two exhaustive articles (both inspired by a discussion on a Reddit thread) are definitely worth checking out.
So, how do you laugh in your language?
Written by Silvia Morani
Communication Trainee at TermCoord