I’ve noticed that some of my local friends use numbers in their instant messages; any ideas what they are? I tried Googling a bit, but couldn’t really figure out what I was supposed to search for.
Yes, it isn’t very easy to Google that one, unless of course you’re part of a fantastic team of experts with their finger on the pulse. A team of people so awesome they can write a comprehensive answer to your question while juggling print deadlines, caffeine crashes and angry editors. Well, okay, we have an Arab on the team so we just asked him. But he did tease us a bit, so we get why you don’t want to ask your friends.
If you’d searched for Arabic Chat Alphabet or even Arablish, you would have found your answer. This is what the people in the know call this strange and confusing version of instant messaging dialect. The gist of it is that typing with Arabic keyboards is more complicated than English, and most people in the online Arab world already know where all the keys are on their Qwerty, so they’d rather not learn again – very often computers won’t even have an Arabic option, or Arabic keyboards. These people also want to use their own language (talk about having your cake and eating it) because some things are apparently too time-consuming to describe in English. Fair enough, but then the Arabic alphabet has sounds that English can’t duplicate.
And that’s what Arablish is; it’s a transliteration of Arabic sounds into the English/Roman alphabet. So letters like the ayn that starts words like Ain or Ali is written as a 3, and you’ll see 3ain and 3ali instead. That difficult ‘h’ sound or the haa is written as a 7, so words like helou (sweets) or halal are actually written 7elou and 7alal. It gets really complicated when everything is mixed up, and sentences start to look like something Shakespeare left behind when he abandoned his stint as a mathematician. But to chatters it makes perfect sense.
There are another half dozen or so codes as well, but, after saying all that, this won’t really help you understand them, if you don’t already know Arabic. Instant messages in the Middle East use a mix of English and Arabic, and you’d need to know both languages as well as the particular dialect that chatters are using before you can listen in. If you need to fake a few messages, though, here are a few common words you can throw in: 7abibi (my love), la2 (no), khalas (enough, finish), keif 7alak (how are you) and ma3leish (it’s all right). Thanks for writing in!
