Ohasis izz Guud Fezth

If you are guilty of texting as above, you are most likely a Jejemon. A Jejemon is described as a person who has managed to subvert the English language to the point of incomprehensibility. It is a linguistic phenomenon that emerged in Philippines in the  early 2000s, out of the Filipino youths’ desire to evolve the traditional short hand typing. The way of texting was christened as Jejetalking.

The word Jejemon is a portmanteau of ‘Jeje’, the Filipino onomatopoeia for ‘hehe’ and ‘mon’ from Pokemon. The identity attached to this way of texting soon grew so strong amongst the Filipino youth, that a whole new subculture was born off of it. The established hipster trend has its own fashion element, Jejefashion (attributed by baggy pants and caps worn backwards, and hipster shoes) and also dedicated places for its
practitioners to meet-up called Jejelands.

The Jejemon soon combined English and Tagalog with Jejetalking, giving rise to Jejenese, which according to some sources was a complete language in itself. Jejebet was the orthography of Jejenese. Words of this new language were formed by rearranging letters,  alternating capitalizations, substituting letters by Arabic numbers, and over-utilizing H, X, and Z.

This cultural phenomenon was so widespread at one point; that the Department of Education had to issue PSA’s to curb the further deterioration of the written language in the nation. The Jejemon found an unexpected ally in the Catholic Church of the nation, which defended the trend by stating that there weren’t any negative values attached to it.

This hipster culture received much backlash from the general public, who berated Jejemon by calling them the new Jologs , a term used to refer to the people of lower class of the society in Philippines. The proponents of free speech however, defended the trend as a way of expression for the youth not well versed in English.

The Jejemon spawned the existence of the Jejebusters, a group of cyber grammar vigilantes, which took it on itself to eradicate this linguistic monstrosity from the face of the internet. Starting in the early 2010’s, Jejenese began to see a decline in usage, as a result of the popularization of smartphones and the subsequent removal of the 160 character limit with the SMS, widely believed to be the primary motivation behind trend initially. The word has since degraded to a pejorative term used to describe the poorly educated youth of lower classes, who appropriate the hip-hop culture and the language being used in a sarcastic context on certain internet forums.