Gal-Moji, Japanese highschool girls’ leetspeak
If l33t is an English phenomenon mainly among Geek, “Gal-Moji” (”Moji” = letters) is the counterpart in Japanese by cellularphone users, especially teenager girls.
Like leekspeak, Gal-Moji replaces the original Japanese letter with similar looking letter. Things making that more caotic is, however, Japanese language has 3 different character sets, Hiragana, Katakana and Chinese-origin Kanji with Roman alphabet and Arabic numerals, the total number of which can be over 3,000 letters. Letters not used in Japanese text like Cyrillic and Greek alphabets are even used.
Here is a sample of Gal-Moji “dictionary” from Wikipedia. The left side Hiragana (original Japanese letters) can be replaced with other similar shape letters.
Similar shape? For me it is really hard to answer the target letter from letters on right side.
Kanji are morphed like these,
Gal-Moji was once a social phenomenon around 2002 when all mass-media took it as a young generations’ wierd fashion. Recently there are less used than before, one of the biggest reason is that most cellularphone now having their original pictogram characters(E-moji) to let you show your emotion more easily. But you still happen to see them in many places on the web, especially when it is on mobile websites for youth.
In popular lore, use of these secret language is to show their unity, to strengthen the concept of belonging to a friends group and to hide their communication from adults.
See also:
“www” has another meaning in Japanese Web
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[...] 04:22:13 pm on June 3, 2008 | # | Tags: cell phone, Gal-Moji, japan, mobile, phone If you think l33t speak is hard then check out what Japanese school girls have invented, Gal-Moji (letters) is a form of abbreviated Japanese language used mostly by teenage girls when text…. [...]
[...] : Akky Akimoto Asiajin, 1.06.2008 : Fushigi Nippon, 4.06.2008 Wednesday, June 4th, 2008 at 10:55 am , , . RSS 2.0 trackback . [...]
Was surprised to read here that the most popular community on mixi is the one about emoji with about 460,000 members!
http://www.mobinode.com/?p=393#
Internet culture really is different here in Japan.
ASCII art is another tech otaku culture phenomenon that I’m sure must be bigger here than anywhere else. You can even buy books on emoji and ASCII art.
It’s interesting what people find interesting.