With thanks to my students in Class 201, Academic Year 2025–2026, for always teaching me, making me laugh, and reminding me that language is alive in the smallest details.
A student once sent a message in our class WhatsApp group that looked like a keyboard accident: “JSJHGHGHGJBJBJBJBSBSB.” When I asked whether something was wrong, she laughed and said, “Teacher, it just means I’m laughing. A lot.” That moment raised a question worth taking seriously: what if this digital chaos is not chaos at all? Turkish Gen Z keysmash, I have come to think, is a small sociolinguistic system with its own grammar of closeness.
As an English instructor in Istanbul, I spend a lot of time observing how students move between formal academic language, classroom interaction, and everyday digital communication. Over the past few months, I asked a number of Turkish Gen Z students about their use of “random” letter strings in messaging. This was not a formal study but a set of informal conversations with students about something they all recognised immediately. Their answers showed that keysmash is not simply a careless substitute for “haha” or “LOL.” It is part of a shared digital repertoire.
This observation sits within a wider field of research on computer-mediated discourse: the study of how people make meaning when they interact through networked devices. Susan Herring and Jannis Androutsopoulos have shown that digital writing is not a degraded version of speech or writing, but a socially organised form of discourse in its own right.
By keysmash, I mean strings of letters typed quickly to represent laughter, amusement, excitement, or emotional intensity. In Turkish youth texting, examples may look like “JSJHGHG,” “BJBJBJBJ,” or much longer chains of consonants. To an outsider, these forms look meaningless. To many of the students I spoke with, they carry subtle social information.
Length carries meaning
One student told me that a short string means the joke was mildly funny, but a long one means the conversation itself is enjoyable. Another explained that if she sends a very long keysmash, it does not only mean “I laughed.” It can also mean “I like talking to you.”
Length matters. A few letters may show politeness or light amusement. A longer sequence may signal genuine laughter. A very long one may show strong engagement, closeness, or flirtatious interest. In this sense, keysmash works as a digital paralinguistic cue. It replaces some of the tone, breath, gesture, and facial expression that are missing from written chat.
The internet linguist Gretchen McCulloch calls this kind of work “typographical tone of voice”: the way punctuation, capital letters, spacing, and repetition carry voice and stance online. Turkish keysmash belongs to that family of practices, but it has a local style and rhythm.
The students I spoke with also described a related practice: stretching the final letter of a word. Tamam becomes tamammm, evet becomes evettt, nolur becomes nolurr. These are not spelling mistakes. They soften the message. Yoram Kalman and Darren Gergle have studied this kind of letter repetition across languages and argue it works as a unique link between spoken prosody and written text — a way to bring the rise and fall of the voice into a medium that has none.
Most of the students I spoke with agreed that stretched letters show warmth or closeness, but the meaning shifts with context. Between close female friends, such forms may feel ordinary and affectionate. Between a young man and a young woman, the same forms are often read as more suggestive. One student said that if a boy writes tamammm with several extra letters, “something is going on.”
Personal styles and silent readers
Variation was one of the most interesting things to come out of these conversations. Some students said they almost always begin their keysmash with the same two or three letters. What looks random from the outside becomes a kind of personal signature, and their friends can recognise their style of “randomness.”
Others said they never use keysmash themselves but receive it often and understand it perfectly. They are passive members of the system. They may prefer emojis or more conventional forms, but they still know what keysmash means. Participation and understanding are not the same thing.
Emojis came up as another point of generational distinction. Several students described classic emojis, especially yellow laughing faces, as slightly old-fashioned, associating them with parents, teachers, or an earlier stage of smartphone culture.
One student said that sending the laughing emoji can look like “trying too hard.” This does not mean emojis have disappeared. Their meanings have shifted. Some survive because they are ironic, exaggerated, or deliberately awkward. But standard smileys may no longer feel natural to many Gen Z users. Keysmash feels more flexible and less pre-packaged.
Gender also shaped how the students described digital expressiveness. Female students generally described longer stretches, more frequent keysmash, and more open expressions of warmth as normal. Male students often described more cautious use. One male student said that too many repeated letters could make him look “weird” in front of male friends. Even playful forms, in other words, are shaped by gendered ideas about emotional expression and self-presentation.
What teachers might take from this
Caroline Tagg’s work on digital communication is useful here because it reminds us to check popular worries about online writing against what people actually do with language in everyday life. From that angle, keysmash is not a failure of literacy. It is a resource for interaction.
Young people are not ruining language when they type “JSJHGHGHG.” They are solving a communication problem. Written chat is fast, emotional, and socially delicate. It needs ways to show tone, closeness, irony, embarrassment, and delight. Standard spelling is often too cold for this. “Haha” may be too weak. “LOL” may feel dead. Emojis may feel too generic. So users invent forms that are messy enough to feel alive.
For language teachers, this matters. We often see students only through formal writing — essays, presentations, exams. But outside the classroom they move through rich digital registers with their own norms and sensitivities. These registers may not belong in academic essays, but they are still meaningful language practices.
What struck me in these conversations was how much creativity and social awareness the students showed. They knew when keysmash was appropriate, when it was too much, when it sounded flirtatious, and when it would seem strange. They had rules, even if they had never written them down.
This is why Turkish keysmash deserves attention. It is not just laughter. It is a small sociolinguistic system for managing relationships in text. Every “JSJHGHGHGJBJBJBJ” carries more than noise. It may say, “That was funny.” It may say, “I’m comfortable with you.” It may say, “This conversation matters.”
Once you learn to read it, the chaos starts to look like social order.
Further reading
Herring, Susan C., and Jannis Androutsopoulos. 2015. “Computer-Mediated Discourse 2.0.” In The Handbook of Discourse Analysis, edited by Deborah Tannen, Heidi E. Hamilton, and Deborah Schiffrin. Wiley Blackwell.
Kalman, Yoram M., and Darren Gergle. 2014. “Letter Repetitions in Computer-Mediated Communication: A Unique Link Between Spoken and Online Language.” Computers in Human Behavior 34: 187–193. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2014.01.047
McCulloch, Gretchen. 2019. Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language. New York: Riverhead Books.
Tagg, Caroline. 2015. Exploring Digital Communication: Language in Action. London: Routledge.
Mohsen Askari is an English instructor and EdTech researcher at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul. His work focuses on academic writing, AI-mediated language learning, student communication practices, and the relationship between language, technology, and youth culture.
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