Miguxês

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (July 2011)

Miguxês (Portuguese pronunciation: [miguˈʃe(j)s] or [mɨɣuˈʃeʃ]), also known in Portugal as pita talk or pita script (pronounced [ˈpitɐ]), is an internet slang of the Portuguese language, commonly used by Brazilian teenagers in Internet and other electronic media, such as messages written in cell phone. Its name derives from miguxo, a corruption from amiguxo, turn a term used for amiguinho, or "buddy" in Portuguese. This sociolect brings possible simplifications in the grammatical structures, since the vehicles in which miguxês is used are nearly universally colloquial, often space delimited (such as SMS messages, instant messenger or Twitter). Often certain expressions are shown to change the meaning of the phrase: "...hmm, tá.", meaning "huh, okay" (hm represents that a person is dramatizing out the sentence; it is also found in narratives written in educated Portuguese).

There are identitarian and orthographic differences between the so-called leetspeak, miguxês, tiopês and internetês — Brazilian Portuguese for netspeak, which is by far the one that most closely resembles educated Portuguese —, all common internet slangs in the Portuguese-speaking digital network community.

Basically, the use of each category depends on the individual choice and the environment in which people are interacting. While in the Internet, in a general manner, there is a handful of different phenomena in which users communicate with abbreviations to simplify writing, miguxês carries with it an affective intention, that is, to express an infantile language in a conversation between friends, or even satirize this style of communication. In certain subcultures in Brazil, especially in the case of what is called 'emo' there, miguxês is an item of group identification. So it would not be unusual for someone which opposes such subcultures to also develop a distaste for miguxês. Brazilian 'anti-emo' groups usually satirize 'emo' teenagers with use of miguxês.

Brazilian indie and scene kids use a related internet slang, the tiopês (from tiop, which is Portuguese tipo, a slang equivalent to English "like, totally", in tiopês), which mainly uses ingroup memes as well purposeful ridiculous-sounding misspellings to add humor or irony to the message and bring group identification, much like teh of English-derived leetspeak. As it is common for the miguxês, there are detractors of tiopês, although much less numbered and for different reasons (usually, people which are detractors at the same time of different youth subcultures deemed as alienated, including 'emo' teenagers, scene kids and indie kids). Tiopês is also much less common in the Portuguese-speaking internet community, and is said to be a phenomena limited to Brazil.

Spelling

Although orthography rules of miguxês may vary individually, and also in each region and in differents urban tribes since it is plain broken Portuguese, there are certain characteristics often commonly found as:

• Replacement of s and c forx, simulating the palatization of Portuguese-speaking children's speech throughout their learning: você (Second person singular), vocês (Second person plural) > vuxeh, vuxeix;
• Omission of diacritics, or its replacement, in some cases, with the letter h (acute accent) or n/m (tilde, which in Portuguese represents nasal vowel): será (will be), árvore (tree), não (no) > serah, arvore, nawn/naum
• Replacement of i by ee, influenced by English language orthography: gatinha (female kitten, also a slang for pretty girl) > gateenha;
• Replacement of o and e by u and i respectively, specially in non-tonic syllables: quero (I want) > keru.
• Replacing the digraph qu and the letter c as k, and deleting the u of these environments: quem (who), escreveu (wrote) > kem, ixkrevew

See also

• SMS language
• Cyberculture
• Internet meme

References

• (in Brazilian Portuguese)
• (in Brazilian Portuguese)
• "O jeito certo de falar errado na internet", The right way to misspell on the Internets - O Estado de S.Paulo, 21/4/2008, (in Brazilian Portuguese)