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Comment by franciscop | Hacker News Reader

In Spanish on my teen years, which saw the rise of SMS and MSN Messenger, it was very common to see a simplified version of Spanish, where "hola" became "ola" since the h is mute, and similar changes. It was a brief period though, since now everyone (my age) uses proper grammar, and younger generations use English mixed in instead.

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ola k ase?

But that was because of the hard character limit in SMS messages, and that they used to cost money.

It was also very common to write long messages in "translit" (substituting Latin letters for equivalent Cyrillic ones, e.g. ф -> f) back then here in Russia since you could fit in 160 characters using GSM 03.38 (7-bit encoding) instead of 70 characters with UCS-2 (UTF-16 encoded) and SMS messages were quite expensive.

Transliterated messages are still quite popular in Georgia (გამარჯობა, როგორ ხარ? > gamarjoba, rogor xar?), even in places where character limits don't apply. Which makes it practically impossible to use any translation services, as there are many ways to substitute a single letter or a sound, making reversing extremely hard. And if you add to the mix the poor quality of those translation services for Georgian language in general, you get texts that mostly make sense to just native speakers.

My younger Mexican in-laws who still occasionally use text-ese would say "q" instead of "k" (the latter normally being pronounced ka, while q is pronounced que).

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