Voices en Español

Live in a Spanish-speaking place long enough and you eventually pick up most of the shorthand used in SMS (electronic text messaging). I did a little digging around and put together the following list. If anyone knows of any different ones or disagrees with any of the ones I list here, please leave a comment.

Before I dive in, just a few basic rules about Spanish SMS shorthand. It follows pretty much the same principles as English SMS in that letters or numbers are substitutes for words or syllables. But Spanish accent marks are generally left out. Another important difference, vowels, which are so important in spoken Spanish, can be removed in text messaging. For example: hola becomes hl, gente becomes gnt, texto becomes txt, and bastante morphs into bstnt.

The syllable ca and the word que can be represented by the single letter k. Que can also be written solely as q.

Here’s a suggested list of some other ones. The words in bold are the abbreviations.

Photo by SixFeetOver and used with his permission.

a2 (adiós)

aa (años)

cia (compañía)

dcir (decir)

dd (días)

dir (dirección)

exclnt (excelente)

fsta (fiesta)

fvor (favor)

gf, jf (jefe)
hcr (hacer)

hr (hora)

kro (caro)

lgr (lugar)

mjr (mejor)

nd (nada)

pers (personas)

prblm (problema)

qndo (cuando)

s (ese)

salu2 (saludos)

ste (este)

tb (también)

t2 (todos)

thanx (gracias)

x (por)

xfa (por favor)

xq (porque)

xtrangero (extranjero)

Days of the week:

do (domingo), lu (lunes), mar (martes), mi (miércoles), ju (jueves), vi (viernes), sa (sábado).

‘ (minuto), ‘s (minutos), “ (segundos)

Got any others? Leave them in the comments section si kt d la gana!