Jejemon

Jejemon (Tagalog pronunciation: [ˈdʒɛdʒɛmɔ̝n]) is a popular culture phenomenon in the Philippines. According to Urban Dictionary, a Jejemon is a person "who has managed to subvert the English language to the point of incomprehensibility." [1] The Philippine Daily Inquirer describes Jejemons as a "new breed of hipster who have developed not only their own language and written text but also their own subculture and fashion."[2][3]

Origins

This style of shorthand typing arose through the short messaging service, in which each text message sent by a cellphone is limited to 160 characters, evident in popular phone models in the early 2000s such as Nokia 5110.[4] As a result, an "SMS language" developed in which words were shortened in order to fit the 160-character limit. However, some jejemons are not really "conserving" characters; instead, they are lengthening their message.[2] On April 14, 2010, on a Pinoy Tumblr, a post about vice presidential candidate Jejomar Binay indicated that he was the Jejemon's preferred vice presidential candidate, complete with a fake poster with him called "Makki Autors". Later the use of word jejemon to refer to such people made rounds in various Filipino internet message boards.[2]

The word Jejemon is a portmanteau of the Japanese animated series, Pokémon, and hehe is an expression of laughter.

Such short-handed language is not limited to Filipinos: Thais use "5555" to denote "hahahaha," since the number 5 in Thai language is pronounced as "ha."[3]

Demographics

The Jejemons are said to be the new jologs, a term used for Filipinos of the lower income class.[1][3] The parameters of being classified as a Jejemon are still unclear, and how the different "levels" of "Jejemonism" are reached,[5] although there are named levels such as "mild," "moderate" and "severe" or "terminal."[6]

Language

The sociolect of the Jejemons, called Jejenese, is derived from English, Filipino and their code-switched variant, Taglish. It has its own, albeit unofficial, orthography, known as Jejebet, which uses the Filipino variant of the Roman alphabet, Arabic numerals and other special characters. Words are created by rearranging letters in a word, alternating capitalization, over-usage of the letters H, X or Z.[3] Superfluous as well as the presence of silent letters characterize its spelling convention. It has similarities with Leetspeak, primarily the alphanumeric nature of its writing.

Reaction

Several Facebook fan pages were created both in support and against the group. Celebrities such as Alessandra de Rossi, Ces Drilon, and Lourd de Veyra have condemned the wholesale ridicule of the subculture.[2][7] Due to the sudden existence of jejemons, 'Jejebusters' were created, a group of internet grammar vigilantes, typically Filipinos, dedicating their internet lives towards the eradication of jejetyping and jejemon existence.

YouTube videos were also uploaded parodying the Jejemons, connecting them to the 2010 election campaign. Edited television advertisements of Nacionalista Party proclaiming their disdain, and an edited photograph of Gilberto Teodoro with him holding a sign saying that the Jejemons should be "brought back to elementary school" went viral.[8] In 2010, the Filipino GMA Network broadcast the situational comedy JejeMom, headlined by Eugene Domingo.

As part of the pre-school year clean-up of schools for the upcoming 2010–11 school year, the Department of Education (DepEd) strongly discourages students from using Jejemon spelling and grammar, especially in text messaging. Communicating with others using Jejemon "language" is said to cause deterioration of young Filipino students’ language skills.[9]

Decline and a change of definition

From early 2013 onwards, with the rise of smartphones which began to overtake feature phones in terms of sales in the country, the phenomenon seems to have made a gradual decline in mainstream popularity. Some social media accounts use such spellings to this date, but most of them are used for sarcasm. The term "jejemon" would gradually shift definition to a pejorative term to describe a stereotype of poorly educated young people wearing hip-hop clothing, roughly similar to the British slang term chav for sportswear. As of 2017, the Jejemon are also called "hypebeasts" and are recognizable for wearing counterfeit skateboarding or car culture-related brands.

gollark: I made an automatic rap generation programIt works by appending an unrelated word which rhymes with the end of the previous line amTo every second lineThis totally counts as rap mineVery valid rap indeedI win esolangs now speed
gollark: Nobody can diss my rhymesBecause they are made from fresh limesThis is the next lineApparently that rhymes with pine
gollark: My rhymes are strangeBut I'm going to rhyme with orængeI'm using a rhyming dictionaryOnline, not from the libraryTechnically it's an API for word association queriesThere exists a thing known as a "geometric series"
gollark: I am going to rip you apartSimilarly to shredded cheeseBy deploying a railgunWhich shoots bees
gollark: I made time parsing workthough it has a weird quirkbecause it turns out that general parsing of times is quite a hard problem, so I just had it parse one hardcoded date format, parse time *deltas* using a nice regex, and use some random library for the rest.

See also
  • Studly caps

References
  1. Nacino, Joseph (2010-04-26). "Jejemon in the Philippines". CNET Asia. Archived from the original on 2012-08-28. Retrieved 2010-04-30.
  2. Lim, Ronald (2010-04-27). "How do you solve a problem like the Jejemons?". The Manila Bulletin. Archived from the original on 2012-09-15. Retrieved 2010-04-30.
  3. ">Jejemons: The new 'jologs'". Philippine Daily Inquirer. 2010-04-24. Archived from the original on 2010-04-27. Retrieved 2010-04-30.
  4. Carag, Elaine (2010). Myx Magazine. Quezon City, Philippines: ABS-CBN Publishing, Inc. p. 25.
  5. Biado, Ed (2010-04-30). "The jejemon phenom". Manila Standard Today. Retrieved 2010-05-01.
  6. "The jejemon phenomenon: What do language experts say?". GMANews.tv (in Tagalog). 2010-04-29. Retrieved 2010-05-01.
  7. de Veyra, Lourd (29 April 2010). "Lourd de Veyra: Attack, Jejemons, Attack!". spot.ph. Archived from the original on 14 May 2010. Retrieved May 11, 2010.
  8. Faye Monchelle Gonzalez and Cherry Anne M. Mungcal (2010-05-01). "'Anti-jejemon' campaign goes viral on the web". ABS-CBNnews.com. Retrieved 2010-05-01.
  9. "'DepEd seeks to purge schools of 'jejemon' mentality". GMANews.tv. 2010-05-22. Retrieved 2010-05-25.
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.