No Stupid Questions

One of my favorites is in Japanese. Laughing is "w" or "www" or something. The word is "warau". So then the ws, they look like grass, so people use the grass emoji, so then people write "kusa".

Not necessarily an acronym, but here's a fun one for Japanese: Laughing in Japanese is warau, which gets shortened when typing to just w. If you want to laugh a lot, you would type wwww. That ends up looking like a field of grass, so that in turn gets shortened into 草 (kusa, or grass). Basically, 草 is the Japanese equivalent of lol

Also, in Chinese, thank you is often abbreviated as 3q, because when you say it out loud, it sounds like "thank you" (san kyu)

In Sesotho, "how are you?" is "ho joang?" which gets shortened to "hj"

Assuming you mean texting style acronyms, yeah, we have them in German and I'd assume in other languages too.

Alongside the stuff borrowed from English 1:1, there's stuff like bb for "Bis bald" (See you soon) or hdl for "hab dich lieb" (Love you)

I'd assume other languages do the same out of efficiency or laziness.

One that I'm aware of is "tskr" in Japanese. It's a slang term that derives from たすかる (tasukaru). The meaning depends on the context and it can mean something like either "you saved me" or "thanks for helping me".

Nepali has quite a few.

का. म. पा. (Ka ma pa) - Kathmandu Mahanagar Palika - Greater Kathmandu Metro.

मा. प. से. (Ma Pa Se) - Madak Padartha Sewan - directly translates to taking of illicit substance but is used to describe DUI

ने. बि. (Ne Bi) - Nepal Bidhyarthi - Nepal student (Association)

भु. पु. (Bhu Pu) - Bhoot Purva - Past/previous.

There are more that I'm blanking out on right now.

French :

ftg : ferme ta gueule (shut it) ntm : nique ta mere (fuck your mom) slt : Salut (hello) cv : ça va ? (How are you?) ptn : putain (fuck) srx : sérieux (really?) jpp : j'en peux plus (I'm fed up)

IMO in German = mMn (meiner Meinung nach)

But for the most part we use the English ones

Yes. Here are some common ones in my native language, danish:

• pga: på grund af (because of)
• dvs: det vil sige (used for adding additional explaination)
• ift: i forhold til (in relation to)

I’m certain there are also some more modern slang abbreviations in use, but these change relatively frequently, like they do in English.

A French one is common enough that it's used in English- "Répondez, s'il vous plaît" (Respond, if you please) is where we get RSVP. "SVP" is also sometimes used as a shorthand for "please", at least in Quebecois.

ex-USSR early rusophonic internet had a lot of original and transliterated ones but I rarely see them nowadays, and most are community-specific. Some didn't carry over, some replaced by chat stickers, and the writing\reading of longer posts itself seems like a niche now when there are audio and video messages at hand. Add there that the web space I talk about is now also fragmented and occupied by bots\dummies due to the war and many sites for international communication on russian lost a big part of frequent posters\mods and later effectively musk'ed themselves.

Those I've heard the last:

imo > кмк > как мне кажется > what I suspect is
bf > мч > молодой человек > young partner
wtf > чзх > что за хуйня > what's a dickshit
idk > хз > хуй (его) знает > dick knows (that)

A lot of newer words I googled after hearing it from kids came from TikTok and they are mostly translations of trends carried in by local influencers.

I'm Portuguese we don't use many acronyms, but we have shorter versions of words with the vowels removed or things like that. When people tried to use acronyms we ended up with "fds" which some people read as weekend, others read as "fuck it". The only other acronyms I can think of right now are all for offenses such as fdp (son of a bitch) and cdf ("ass of iron", very old term for calling someone a nerd).

I don't speak French natively but I happen to know their version of lol is "mdr", short for mort de rire (dying of laughter)

In Thai they’ll text 555 for hahaha as 5 sounds like ha in Thai

Of course! In Greek we say ΓΤΠ and sometimes anglicise it a gtp. It directly translates "for the dick" which means something is rubbish.

We sometimes shorten γαμώτο (fuck) το 'γμτ'

In slovenia, we have (I know this isn't the exact same thing)

1. Informal:

• LP - lep pozdrav (something like best regards)

2. Formal

• itd - in tako dalje (something like etc.)
• npr - na primer (for example)

In Spanish there's some things like "xq" instead of "por qué/porque" but it was only used in SMS messaging to use less characters. If someone talks to me like that I won't reply, it just doesn't have the same vibes as in English.

...which makes me kind of a hypocrite for using "obv" for obviously (obviamente).

I just wanna throw in French‘s s.v.p. for s’il vous plait, “please“, and German’s valediction MfG for Mit freundlichen Grüßen, “with best regards/wishes/greetings”.

The latter is disappearing again I think. It was actually meant as a parody in a very popular 1999 song about German acronymization madness by the rap group Die Fantastischen 4. Somehow people then thought it was okay to use it in adult correspondence.

Absolutely. The German term equivalent to writing "Sincerely," at the end of letters is "Mitt freundlichen grußen," and it was (is?) often written as "M.f.G." There's even a song by the German pop/rock band Die Fantastischen Vier titled "M.f.G." The lyrics are almost entirely various abbreviations (here's a version of the song with the lyrics, but not the video).