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Nikita Kuzmin told me about a trend among young Chinese to exchange certain characters with other phonetically close characters in their Internet writings, so that the words sound more "cute".

Here are some examples of such substitutions:

jiègè 介個 — zhège 這個 ("this")

pényǒu 盆友 — péngyǒu 朋友 ("friend")

nánpiào 男票 — nán péngyǒu 男朋友 ("boyfriend")

xièxiè 蟹蟹 — xièxiè 謝謝 ("thanks")

kāisēn 開森 — kāixīn 開心 ("happy")

suìjué/jiào 碎觉 — shuìjiào 睡覺 ("sleep")

Don't worry overmuch about the meanings of the characters in the first half of each pair, because they are being used for their sound. Still, in this kind of word play, the latent meanings of the substituted characters often add another level of levity.

jiègè 介個 ("interpose piece")

pényǒu 盆友 ("basin friend")

nánpiào 男票 ("male ticket")

xièxiè 蟹蟹 ("crab crab")

kāisēn 開森 ("open forest")

suìjué/jiào 碎觉 ("shattered awake/asleep")

One of Nikita's Chinese friends told him that this type of word play is due to the influence of Taiwanese guoyu (Mandarin) pronunciation, as well as to the influence of the topolects.

This is but one way in which netizens today are playing with the characters to achieve all sorts of special effects, both phonetic and semantic. Taiwan is an especially fertile place for this kind of linguistic legerdemain, e.g.:

"Further evidence of mixed script writing in Chinese" (1/19/18)

"The Westernization of Chinese" (9/6/12)

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