Miguxês

Miguxês, also known in Portugal as pita talk or pita script is the popular name of a sociolect 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, "buddy" in Portuguese. This sociolect brings possible simplifications in the grammatical structures of adolescents, since the vehicles which are used are often colloquial, often light and space delimited. Often certain expressions are shown to change the meaning of the phrase: "...hmm, tá.", meaning "huh, okay" (hm represents that a person is contemplating or dramatizing out the sentence).

There are differences between the so-called miguxês, internetês (Brazilian Portuguese for netspeak) and leet, all other sociolects in the digital network environment.

Basically, the choice for each category depends on the user's intent. While the Internet has a practical purpose to communicate quickly with abbreviations (often forming almost a shorthand language), the miguxês carries with it an emotional intention, is to express an infantile language in a conversation between friends or even satirize this style of communication. In certain subcultures in Brazil, specially what is called emo there, miguxês is an item of group identification. So it would not be unusual for someone who opposes such subcultures also develop a distaste for miguxês.

Spelling

Although the orthographic vary from person to person, from group to group and region to region, there are certain characteristics often commonly found as:

• Replacement of s and c forx, simulating the palatization of Brazilian 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 orthographic: 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 from u to non-syllabic 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)