Malaysian Instagram slang bank creates a graphic archive of the country’s unique urban language
- Slang can come and go quickly, and a group of Malaysians decided to preserve uniquely Malaysian examples for posterity
- They started an Instagram MySlangBank page, and so far there are 300 graphically illustrated slang terms
“Loading” according to the Cambridge dictionary is defined as putting goods onto a vehicle, or in finance it means a charge added to an investment. But to Malaysians, since the arrival of the internet, “loading” refers to someone slowly processing information. This is one of the 300 Malaysian slang terms posted so far on the on MySlangBank Instagram account, an archive of urban language made famous by social media and terms already woven into the country’s culture and identity.
“It started as a way to catalogue slang words because some come and go rather quickly. It’s like a bank of slang, which is how we got our name,” said Fazlee Sabbaruddin, a creative director of the TBWA agency, which launched MySlangBank.
“Some words we would never hear again and some have multiple meanings, so we wanted a place to house it all.”
MySlangBank started as a list of words on an Excel sheet and grew into an Instagram page with the slang accompanied by in-your-face graphics that give a visual and literal meaning to uniquely Malaysian slang terms such as “fefeeling”. This term – which expresses a mood or feeling of indulgence – received a psychedelic illustration by designer Olivia Ariferiani.
But when does a word or phrase become slang? “We think it’s only when a word is used informally or not accepted as a real word, but used commonly by a group of people, a race, region or subculture,” Sabbaruddin said.