Spanish Internet Slang

This all changed when there was an explosion in the number of Hispanic internet users and Spanish-speakers throughout the world starting getting online.

At first, however, English was still used by most non-native English speakers as the default language of internet slang. It wasn't too long before Spanish-speakers began to invent their own abbreviations and other types of word plays to be used online. While there are still some phrases that are used in English and haven't found "sticky" Spanish language alternatives, a lot of internet slang has been translated.

Not just the Internet
It's important to remember that this phenomenon is not strictly confined to the Internet. With the explosion of cell phones throughout the world, text messages have also undergone this transformation.

A Spanish speaker could possibly use a whole new set of abbreviations or associated words to text, and a lot of these won't be recognizable by English speakers.

So why is this a problem? Well, right now, if a Spanish speaker and English speaker email one another in their native language, the recipient has the option to at least use a free translation service to try and figure out the rough meaning of the text.

However, with text messaging and Internet slang, there are not as many free online translation programs that you can use to decipher the codes because they change so often.

Lucky for us there are some websites that have attempted to compile lists of text messaging Spanish slang and Spanish internet slang. Check out these three sites and let me know if you know of any others.

Spanish SMS from About.com
This page has a list of some Spanish text shortcuts that are often used in cell phone communication

Internet shortcuts
Included on this page is a list of Spanish text shortcuts used online.

Spanish SMS codes
This page comes from the same site as the one above but instead focuses on Spanish SMS codes

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