Chinese Chat Codes

The proliferation of pager, chat rooms, instant messaging, and phone text messaging has created a whole new set of acronyms and codes designed to minimize the amount of typing. First it was fairly simple acronyms like IMHO ("in my humble opinion") or AFAIK ("as far as I know'). Telephone and pagers, lacking a full keyboard required more inventive approaches such as using 07734 for "hello" (read upside down) or "10" for "you are perfect" (as in a perfect 10). Modern communications technologies, especially the cell phones, are if anything, more popular in Asia than in the West. So what do the Chinese use for codes? The Chinese language, not being alphabetic, does not lend itself to the use of acronyms. However, a few acronyms based on pinyin spellings do exist. Examples include GG for older brother (哥哥, gege) or MM for younger sister (妹妹, meimei).

Fortunately, long before the invention of the telephone, the Chinese already had a tradition of associating certain words with numbers or things based on the similarities of sound. For example, the number eight (八) is considered a lucky number because it is pronounced "ba", which sounds like the Chinese word for prosperity (發, fa). Similarly, the number four (四) is associated with bad luck because it is pronounced "si", which sounds like the Chinese word for death (死,si). Given this tradition, it should be no surprise that there is in fact a large number of numeric codes in existence. Most of the words are represented with numbers having a similar sound or a least a similar leading consonant. One notable exception is the number used to represent the word "you", the number 0. Although the Chinese word for zero does not sound much like like the word for "you", the choice may have resulted from the fact that there is no close-sounding candidate while the same number is used in English codes to represent the same meaning.