“Jejemon” is a name called to some Filipino people, usually teenagers, that send SMS or chat using words with excessive capitalization, improper insertion of the letters H, Z, C, X, J, etc, and the substitution of letters with numbers or sometimes even other letters instead. They are people who subverts English words to the point of incomprehensibility. The word “Jejemon” comes from the words “Jeje”, which is “hehe” in Jejenese (the language of the Jejemon), and Pokemon, the popular television show by Satoshi Tajiri (Jeje + pokeMON = Jejemon). Jejemons are not only seen in chat rooms and through SMS, but also in social networking sites as well. The “Jejemon” wester counterpart is the “Leet Speak” and their rivals are the “Jejebusters”.
People usually type this way for them to be unique and stand out. Other people, however, use this style to compensate for their bad English writing skills. Jejemons usually are composed of people that are considered “tambays”, which are uneducated people. Although the language is mostly used by the male population, it is slowly becoming popular to the girls too.
Comprehending a Jejemons message can be really frustrating. The word “iMiszqcKyuH” can really take some time to decode (the word means “I miss you”) and once decoded it will bring frustration and anger to the one who decoded it. The frustration is because people feel that Jejemons make something as simple as “hello” to a complicated “EoWpFhUeEhsxz”.
However, rather that attacking the Jejemons, what we can do is help them. Poverty in the Philippines is at an all-time-high, and because many people have no money, many children are not being sent to schools, thus not teaching them in the correct ways of the English language.
How come people attack people using Jejenese but not people using Leet speak? Is it beacause Leet speak comes from the word “elite” while Jejemons comes from wrongly spelled hehe's? As the way I see it, they have few differences at all, their biggest difference is that Leet speak is imported while Jejemon is local.
I really hate it when I receive messages from Jejemons that I cannot comprehend, I really do! But I do not hate the Jejemons themselves. It is not their fault that they are not well-versed in the English language, but the fault of poverty. Instead of attacking and shunning them, why not do ways to understand (not their messages, but their personality as a whole) and help them instead?
-D. Meneses
