Martian language

Unconventional representation of Chinese characters online

Martian language , sometimes also called brain disabled characters , is the nickname of unconventional representation of Chinese characters online by various methods. For example, "一個人的時候" (yīgèréndeshíhòu, "When one is alone") can be changed into "ㄧㄍ人ㄉ時候" since the word lang=zh (gē) is consonant of lang=zh and the word lang=zh (dē) is consonant of the word lang=zh in bopomofo.

The etymology of the word, "Martian language", is mostly believed to come from the 2001 Hong Kong comedy Shaolin Soccer, in which Sing (Stephen Chow) tells Mui (Zhao Wei): "Go back to Mars. The Earth is so dangerous." Martian language originated in Taiwan with the introduction of Chinese input methods and online games. It later began to catch on in mainland China when online games like Audition Online were introduced in China.

The Martian language is written in Chinese using various substitution methods. Just like in l33t, where the letter "e" is replaced by the number "3", in Martian, standard Chinese characters are replaced with nonstandard ones or foreign scripts. Each Chinese character may be replaced with:

There is no universal way of encoding standard Chinese to the Martian language, though some substitutions are popular and have even leaked into the standard language and the spoken language, such as lang=zh (lit. river crab) for lang=zh (harmony), lang=zh (lit. leaf jade essay, also having the format of a person's name) for lang=zh (advertorial).

In the 2006 General Scholastic Ability Test of Taiwan, students were asked to interpret symbols and phrases written in "Martian language" based on contexts written in standard language. Controversies which followed forced the testing center to abandon the practice in future exams. Chinese online netizens later followed the trend of using Martian language since they found their posts written in the new language could more easily pass keyword filtering censorship. For example, when the censorship censored information about Ai Fen, the netizens used Martian language to deceive the censorship.

Below is one example of the nearly infinite number of possible ways to substitute the Preamble of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Note that this is an extreme example, as it is uncommon to write entire paragraphs in Martian language.