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afkc, alliance francaise, culture, europe, expat, france, international, journalist, language, le figaro, paris, technology, Translation, travel
Along with a flourishing social life comes many, many new challenges and adventures.
One of them is the daily struggle to decode my friend’s texts, which can sometimes leave me absolutely baffled.
Just like Americans have g2g and lol and ttyl and a score of other abbreviations, French young people have also taken to these shortcuts despite the moans of their elders (the French are, after all, notorious lovers and defenders of their language.)
- The first shortcut that seriously stumped me was mdr. Try as I might, I kept reading it in my head as ‘murder,’ which seemed pretty drastic in the context of the conversations where it came up. I finally just had to ask. The answer? Not murder, but pretty deadly all the same. Mdr stands for ‘mort de rire,’ which means ‘dying of laughter.’
- A lot of texts can be understood if you just read them aloud as the abbreviations are homonyms. Anything that in French is normally written with a ‘que’ (like quelle, for example) can be shortened to a ‘k’ in a text. In that vein, ‘quelle’ becomes ‘kel.’
- I figured out ‘tt’ by saying it aloud, too… ‘tt’ is an abbreviation for ‘tout.’ Cmt is short for ‘comment’ and pr is ‘pour.’
- As if it was tiring, you don’t need to worry about writing out the full ‘je.’ Simple phrases like ‘je prends’ (I’m taking or I take) becomes ‘jprends.’
- All of this is made five thousand times worse when you account for the inevitable human error of typos, which can happen in any language. It was thus that I got a series of texts about my friend being desperately in love with ‘Karim’ (Who in the WORLD is Karim? I thought desperately) only to later confirm that T9 had replaced ‘Karim’ for ‘Farid’… which made so much more sense. There is still the looming question of how Karim and Farid got switched (still not sure how that happened) but at least I have the story straight.
Dear readers, do you know any text lingo that I am missing out on?