Laughter is universal – all cultures enjoy jokes and laughter. Sometimes we cannot stop ourselves from laughing, even at a bad pun such as “The past, the present and the future walk into a bar… it was tense”. There are even studies showing that laughter therapy can be utilized as one of several ways of treating anxiety and depression. I think most people can agree that laughing is something enjoyable, and even more so if you are laughing with a friend or two. Laughter is so important to us that we have come up with many ways of laughing online, through chats, and the way in which we represent laughter in writing varies across languages.
In English, we have the classic abbreviation lol, ‘laughing out loud’, and its sibling lmao, ‘laughing my ass of’, as well as more onomatopoeic expressions like hahaha. Swedish makes use of the same onomatopoeic expression haha, as well as hehe, but also has an older convention that abbreviated the word “asgarv” (roughly laughing hard’) as asg. It is far less used today as compared to 10 years ago, but at one point it was a common way to show that one is laughing.
Blog posts and discussion forums online lists many different ways of laughing across languages, for example in Spanish, laughter is written jajaja – using the Spanish orthography show the sound of laughing. Russian does the same, laughing by writing xaxaxa, where x is pronounced as /h/. Greek also uses xaxaxa to express laugher, again x is pronounced as /h/. There are also other ways of expressing laughter onomatopoetically, in Thai for example, 555 can be used to write laughter because 5 is pronounced “ha”.
There are different reports of how Japanese speakers type laughter, both wwww and 草 (‘grass’) are said to be used in the language. One explanation that is given is that ‘laugh’ is written with the kanji 笑, pronounced “warai” and which was later shortened to just w. As more laughter was needed, more w’s were added, creating wwwwwwww. Now, stories online tell us that since wwww looks like clusters of grass, the kanji for grass, 草, was jokingly used to represent laughter. There are no reports online on how widespread these different uses are, but it is still interesting to see the creativity of laughing in writing that is shown in these stories.
In the end, despite cross-linguistic differences in how laughter is represented in text, laughter can bring us together and in our digital society we have language-independent ways of expressing laughter: emojis. Whether you are an iOS or an Android user, your laughter can be (somewhat) seamlessly translated using Unicode, and 😂, 😆 or 🤣 will all show you the same emotion – and perhaps emotions are, to some extent, universal to human experience.
Interested in reading more?
About laughter therapy:
Akimbekov, N. S., & Razzaque, M. S. (2021). Laughter therapy: A humor-induced hormonal intervention to reduce stress and anxiety. Current Research in Physiology, 4, 135-138. doi:10.1016/j.crphys.2021.04.002
How to signal sarcasm in writing:
Thompson, D. & Filik, R. (2016). Sarcasm in Written Communication: Emoticons are Efficient Markers of Intention. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 21, pp 105-120. doi:10.1111/jcc4.12156
How to adapt spokenlikeness to writing:
Hård af Segerstad, Y. (2002). Use and Adaptation of Written Language to the Conditions of Computer-Mediated Communication (Doctoral Dissertation). Göteborg: Dept. of Linguistics, Göteborg University. Retrieved from https://gupea.ub.gu.se/handle/2077/15738
More about language use online:
McCulloch, G. (2019). Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language. Riverhead Books.