BAHASA ALAY: GUESS THE MEANING

How can the word ciyus have the same meaning as the word serius (serious in English)? Well, you may get various answers from Indonesian people who are fond of using bahasa Alay.

Bahasa Alay is considered as a language created, used, and shared by alay people. The term alay refers to a group of people particularly teenagers who have a unique look, unique character, and unique language. Some people believe that bahasa Alay has been popular since Short Message Service program was launched. In order to create a message as short as possible, people tend to shorten their words. As time goes by, most Indonesian teenagers have been fond of not only shortening a word but also replacing alphabets with numbers and mixing lower-case letters and upper-case letters to form a word. The surprising thing is there are many new words formed and popular. Although bahasa Alay has been criticized by some people because it “ruins” Indonesian language but it is quite fascinating to learn a little bit about bahasa Alay.

Can you guess what the meaning of “H4! uD4H l4mA nDa KtMu, p4 Kb4R nA!?” is? We will translate it into a proper Indonesian language first.

H4! = hai

uD4H = sudah

l4mA = lama

nDa = tidak

KtMU = bertemu

p4 Kb4R nA!? = bagaimana kabarnya?

In short, that sentence means, “Hai, sudah lama tidak bertemu, bagaimana kabarnya? (Hi, long time no see, how are you?)” We can see that the sentence consists of upper-case letters, lower-case letters, and numbers. What is more, there is no exact rule how it can be like this.