Everyone in the world laughs the same way, but it’s a different story in written form. Anyone who ever texts will know that there are a ton of ways to express laughter. ‘LOL’ and ‘Haha’ are pretty much universal, but nearly every country has its own native textual laughter. In some parts of the world, ‘wkwk’ or ‘555’ are not just gibberish - they’re probably some of the most used words online.
Many languages use onomatopoeias, translating with their own phonetic rules. A few notable ones: jajaja in Spanish, høhøhø in Norwegian or kkkkk in Korean, as the Korean letter keu (크) is used to express laughter. Other languages use numbers, like Thai that appropriates a bunch of fives (as the number 5 is pronounced ‘ha’). The longer the 5, the longer the laughter. Or Mandarin language, with its string of numbers 23333 which is said to represent #233, an old emoji depicting someone laughing crazily.
From Preply:
Turkish: "hahaha", "ahahah", "jsjsjsjs", "weqeqwqewqew" or, the funniest option, random letters like: "dksajdksajdoşad" (which is the most common) are used to laugh.
Indonesian: laughing is represented with “wkwk”, “wkwkwk”, “wakaka” and “xixi”. "wkwkwk" reportedly came into being because it was easier for users to type "k" rather than "h," which would require them to move their forefinger away from its placement on the keyboard. That’s why these onomatopoeias became popular.
Spanish: laughing is represented with “jajaja”. When you express irony, use “jejeje” and when you are more mischievous, “jijiji”.
Image: Preply