Yahoo! Philippines Answers blog

It’s been the talk of the town for the past few days and the chatter is very evident online where people searched for it (It was the most searched keyword in Yahoo! Philippines last week Friday) and discussed it on blogs and social media sites.  So what is a Jejemon?  And why is it suddenly being talked about?

The country editor of Yahoo! Philippines decided to bring this question to the Answers community: “What is a ‘jejemon’ and why the sudden popularity?” Almost 400 of you shared what you know about the Jejemon and it certainly helped enlighten a lot of people about it.

Answers user Demi-LAncer gave the best answer to the question.  He shared that word “jejemon” was most likely derived from two words, “jeje” and “Pokemon”.  “Jeje” came from the onomatopoeia for laugh, “hehehe”, but with the “h” replaced with a “j”.

Community member Momonja defined “jejemon” as someone who purposely changes the spelling of typewritten words by alternating uppercase and lowercase letters, replacing letters with other characters, and by adding more characters to the spelling to create a different looking word but pronounced similarly (but with exaggeration) to the original word.

To better understand this concept, here’s a comparison of a normal text and its jejemon version:

Normal: The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.

Jejemon: dhUh qW!k vr0uwN phF0uX jumF3d 0v3r t3h L@izey dhouG

Plok explained that the jejemon “language” is in a way similar to l33t-5p34/< (for leet-speak) and LOL-speak, both products of the early days of chatting online (IRC-talk) and text lingo, but different in that the purpose of this is not to abbreviate or shorten words or phrases but simply to create a different (although more complicated) way of spelling words.

This phenomenon has transcended beyond language and evolved to an actual sub-culture.  It has come to describe the local “gangstahs” who dress up in a certain way (ever seen someone wear a “jeje-cap”?) and act differently as well.

So why all the talk about this right now?  Well, we have to thank presidential candidate Gibo Teodoro for this (or at least the person who photo-shopped his image).  Here’s the image that started all the talk:

I hope that clears the “mystery” behind the Jejemons.  Got any other question about the jejemons?  Please leave a comment below and I’ll do my best to get more answers through the Answers community in the next post.

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