However global the world wide web might have become and how much it has shrunk the world to the state of a ’global village’, there are still certain features and aspects that differ from country to country, and one of these is laughter. For instance, it’s hard to imagine that our regular ’ha-ha’ is not at all used by Thai or Japanese, as they’ve got their own way of denoting this expression of joy.
Intrigued? Bursting with laughter, We offer you a number of laughter translations at a rate of one poster per country.
thefullsignal
Hebrew is quite straightforward. Russian language has the same expression of laughter.
gettyimages
This is not to be confused with the usual ’www’ from a website address. It’s a short verion of a Japanese character that stands for laughter (笑 – ’uarai’). Internet users have simply cut it down to a single ’u’ letter to signify laughter.
dateofdate
We’ve got a feeling everyone’s familiar with the English ’haha’, right?
themalaysiantimes
The Icelanders use haha, hehe and híhí.
gettyimages
Brazilians write huehuehue or rsrsrsrs in Portuguese. Vowels can vary, but the consonants stay the same.
gettyimages
From the ㅋㅋㅋ, which is a korean equivalent of ’hahaha’.
gettyimages
Just a regular ha ha ha.
mainstreetdigest
Apart from immitating the sounds of laughter, French also use an abbreviation MDR (mort de rire) which literally means ’dying from laughter’.
gettyimages
The Danish also stick to the more familiar version of laughter. They go for ha ha, hi hi, hæ hæ, ho ho or hi hi.
legoblogger
In Spanish ’j’ is pronounced as ’h’, so when they write ’jajaja’ it literally means ’hahaha’.
gettyimages
In Italian, a vowel you use to show laughter shows the tone. For instance, ahahah is a standard, loud laughter, and eheheh is a smile, ihihih — giggling, that sometimes shows sarcasm.
gettyimages
In this particular case there is a similarity between the French (MDR) and the American (LOL) abbreviations. DWL in Jamaican stands for ’Dead With Laugh’ or ’Dying with Laughter’.
womanway
Arabic doesn’t have short vowels. That is why the signs in this word are written as ’hhhhh’, and are pronounced ’hahaha’ in this context.
gettyimages
In Thai language, digit 5 is pronounced as ’ha’. So, people use ’55555′ instead of typing out ’ha-ha-ha-ha’.
woman.mynavi
In Chinese ’laughter’ is 笑声, which is pronounced as ’sao shen’. In Mandarin Chinese there are also onomatopoeias 哈哈 which are pronounced as ’ha-ha’, and 呵呵 as ’hе-hе’. The 嘻嘻 (’si-si’) sign signifies giggling.
