The Semiotic Domain Leet Speak

The semiotic domain of a word or phrase can be important, even crucial, to communication. The context, audience, and, words are essential to anybody understanding another person. There are numerous instances throughout anybody’s day wherein they likely experience communication within a specific domain, and are unable to understand what it means with no context. After discovering what exactly a semiotic domain is, and its function in the world, I realized I partake in speaking through these domains quite often. One most important to me regarded coded messages my friends and I would send in school via the domain, Leet Speak.

Leet Speak, otherwise known as L33T Speak, is a domain that would be further classified within netspeak, as it originated online, specifically with individuals who took it upon themselves to scour every inch of the web in their spare time. While I did not have the time in school to commit such an amount of time to the internet, My friends and I found L33T Speak extremely useful and easy to decipher. Fortunately for us at the time, our teachers were woefully ignorant to what the domain was, or how to understand it. It allowed for us to store messages and notes to one another virtually anywhere around the school without being understandable to adults, further facilitating our communication through class.

Why, though, is L33T so difficult for some to understand? My friends and I were at a loss to understand it at the time, as it was easy to us. Primarily, it is difficult to understand because letters can become interchangeable with numbers and symbols. A simple example would be the word, “at,” but the, “a,” would be replaced with the @ symbol, showing, “@t.” This would have been easily decipherable to adults. As such, we enforced a rule that any word with three letters or less would be skipped. If a word looked too obvious, we broke it up into two words. The word, “leet,” even in L33T Speak is highly understandable. In these situations, we would add a symbol or remove a symbol to make it look like a different word through this domain, should we ever be discovered. As such, “l33t,” would become, “l3….3t,” or, “l4t3,” Which actually translates to, “late.” We were able to decipher longer words or words with fewer or additional symbols because we understand it through the context of L33t Speak. Others could not, as we had now cloaked the language in two domains.

The language through the L33t domain remained indecipherable throughout much of my high school career. During my senior year, we were almost found out, however. At this time, we began leaving one and two word messages around school, in new places, in an effort to avoid being discovered. These were also written in L33t Speak but we switched the symbol for, “A,” which is the numerical four, with an exclamation point, which is universally known as the letters, “I,” or, “L,” depending on the context. We also discontinued the use of the number zero as an, “O,” and replaced it with an ampersand. These were adjustments unrelated to L33T itself, but it did add to how difficult the language was to understand, and how important it was to us.

In sum, understanding from the point of a semiotic domain is important to understanding and inherent message. Without this context, language and communication can be difficult or even impossible. Our use of L33t Speak and the variations we added made class and school fun.