> “Translit” (writing Ukrainian/Russian with English characters) was a thing in SMS days, when typing in Cyrillic would shrink your SMS length in half (because that’s how SMS encoding worked, I guess), but now practically nobody uses it anymore.
Ok that's exactly the type of thing I was thinking about. Funny it was born from the limitation of 140 chars rather than from actual input difficulty though.
A dude is still sending me messages in translit over the web every time he's in foreign lands, even though a language is added to the OS' switching set in a few clicks these days.
But back in the 90s to early 2000s, translit was pretty big on the internets due to the dozen of different Cyrillic codepages and some software supporting only 7-bit characters (specifically Fidonet exchange software and newsgroup nodes).
Just the fact that I still to this day run into mis-encoded diacritics in movie subtitles, shows how ‘US first’ ASCII caused a lot of headaches for many years.
(BTW: you probably have been told by now, but your nickname is a common slang word in Russia.)
In India, it was definitely born because of input difficulty, its such a big thing that It has given rise to Hinglish (Mixing Hindi and English) plus translit is the only way 99% of people type here
In Ukraine, no, we don’t. Kids don’t generally know English enough that they would want to speak it with peers, and there are simply no reasons to do so.
“Translit” (writing Ukrainian/Russian with English characters) was a thing in SMS days, when typing in Cyrillic would shrink your SMS length in half (because that’s how SMS encoding worked, I guess), but now practically nobody uses it anymore.