But occasionally, some memes can cause offence to others. One example is the cryptic alien posts that circulated on the platform in 2020, and which are still circulating to this day.
If you wondered what these are all about, here’s a quick guide explaining their meaning.
What Posts Are We Talking About?
If you’ve spent a large amount of time on Twitter, you may have come across tweets like this:
Or this:
Or this:
And the chances are, you were probably spooked out and you quickly scrolled past those tweets.
But what you may not know is these supposedly “cryptic” texts are actually a real language from Africa.
The Amharic Language
The so-called “spooky” language is Amharic, and it is one of the official languages of Ethiopia. Amharic belongs to the Semitic branch of Afroasiatic languages, which includes Arabic and Hebrew.
It is spoken by over 20 million people and has a history spanning back thousands of years.
Amharic became the lingua franca of Ethiopia in the ninth century, and by the 20th century a wealth of literature had been written in Amharic.
So, how did a language so rich in history make its way to that side of Twitter?
How Did Amharic Take Off on Twitter?
After former President Donald Trump tweeted on his (now suspended) Twitter account that he tested positive for COVID-19, internet trolls came together to reply with “curses” under his tweet.
The ex-First Lady Melania Trump was not spared this trolling, either. Most of the texts were copypastas, which are basically templates of texts that get copied and pasted around the internet.
If translated, the Amharic tweets roughly mean:
That doesn’t sound very friendly, does it? In fact, it sounds downright creepy.
Amharic speakers soon began voicing their unhappiness over the disrespectful use of their language, and with good reason.
Twitter users also posted threads about Amharic to spread more information about the language and why using it as a code for a “creepy satanic meme language” is disrespectful.
Be Careful Before Jumping on Bandwagons
These “curse tweets” died down shortly after Donald Trump’s account was suspended. But a quick search on Twitter would reveal that similar tweets in Amharic are still floating around the platform.
Now that you know the context of such tweets and a brief history of Amharic, be more mindful before jumping onto copypasta or meme bandwagons in the future. You never know when the words you use might hurt others.
