What Grass Has to Do With Laughter: Using Slang when Texting in Japanese

You can ‘sound’ fluent and more native-like not only when speaking – also when texting. Slang can also only appear on a purely graphical, textual level, like the funny looking version okay: おk in writing. Going from ‘ok’ to おk isn’t a form of abbreviation, it is simply the result of combining the hiragana character for o which is お with the letter ‘k’.

Moving on to probably one of the most used abbreviations when texting: lol. The Japanese equivalent (more or less) for lol is the kanji 笑, which stands for warau – ‘to laugh’. But instead of texting 笑 at the end of a sentence (which is done often), you could also simply write ‘w’ (or also a couple of ws) which again stands for warau. There is yet another way to express laughter when texting. Since the shape of the letter ‘w’ apparently reminds people of grass, some also use the kanji that itself stands for grass, which is kusa 草, instead of 笑. Interestingly, the connection between laughter and grass here only came into existence via romanization. Without the transcribed ‘w’ there would be no visual similarity to grass – or do you also see a similarity between the untranscribed kanji 笑 and grass?

There also exists a Japanese version for the word ‘bff’: zuttomo ズッ友. Zutto meaning ‘continuously’, ‘all the way’, ‘forever’, and tomo meaning ‘friend’. Put next to each other it should actually be read zutto tomo, but one of the two syllables ‘to’ has been omitted in order to shorten it.

The last example shows a symbiosis between a seemingly endless choice of Japanese words and the English ‘now’. The ‘now’ in Japanese is being represented by either the hiragana nau なう or the katakana nau ナウ, which reads like the English ‘now’. This expression can be used to quickly tell someone what you are doing at the moment or where you are, e.g.: daigaku nau 大学なう (‘I'm at the university now’) or kaimono nau 買い物ナウ (‘I’m shopping’).

Written by Jannick Scherrer