Greeklish

All latin based languages had it easy with computers because their letters were common and actually present in English when computers became available.

In Hellas before Unicode, we had a lot of issues with the codepages, so initially when we wanted to make sure that our text would be readable by other parties, we used latin characters to write down the words. Because, we have been using for ages the term Greek for our nationality, this form of writing became known as Greeklish.

I started communicating heavily throught computers at the age of sixteen around 1996. As every other person, I used Greeklish to communicate and I didn't care much about the harm I was doing to my language, mainly because I was a teenager and I was never good with languages. Some years later when cell phones became available, the first devices were serioulsy lacking the Hellenic characters support. So everybody and especially the youth was texting in Greeklish which they continiued with the im-texting frenzy that followed the same period.

Unicode was widely adopted around 2001 if I remember correctly, but even aftwerwards corporate world used Greeklish because of limited knowledge and because external partners couldn't always read the emails. I still know past colleagues, that when writing internal emails they will automatically write it in Greeklish.

During 2001 I did my first thesis for the university. Then I realized how much damage I had already done with the Hellenics. So I started using the Hellenic character set as much as I good and steadily became annoyed when reading greeklish. Around 2003 I became a member of a technology forum and wrote in hellenic as an effort to improove my forsaken skills in my mother tongue. There was a debate on the same year about whether the Hellenic language should become a rule for valid posts, which I voted for, even though I did a lot of proofing mistakes. And I wasn't the only one. Luckily ADSLgr was actually the first big forum in Hellas that dissallowed the usage of Greeklish and this helped with the cause. 

From my experience I can understand how harmful it is for children writing in greeklish. Hellenic charcter set and language is richer and more difficult than the latin one. When writing in greeklish, proofing is really simplified because combinations of character or different characters or letter for the same sound are reduced to one latin character. It is really easier and this part of the reason I originally accepted it. But this is the reason why people forget their original mother tongue and thus their culture and history. As a kid I used to write Hellenic without proofing errors. Sadly now I can't and I'm to dependent on proofing tools. Even so, my original blog is filled with proofing errors and a lot of friends have been complaining about this.

If you are Hellenic or your mother tongue uses non lating based charcters and you are using a form of greeklish to communicate, please stop. Language and culture is part of our heritage and should at least be respected. And this is comming from a guy that is not that fond of culture.