can anyone tell me what this language is that I see fascists use so much?

I genuinely don't recognize it and I only see it used by nazis. I also have only seen it on tiktok

18 comments

So yeah, this is Tigrinya also spelled Tigrigna, a national language of Eritrea and Ethiopia — in fact tragically earlier this decade Ethiopia carried out genocidal actions against Tigrayans in the northern border region near Eritrea.
The Tigrinya language is like its Ethio-Semitic relative Amharic, with which it is often confused, a beautiful and overlooked language of a storied region of the world, so I think it is a really damn big shame that your first exposure to this language is Nazis trying to evade social media content filters. In fact I'm sure that's one part of why these Nazis do it, that if you come to associate the Abugida with Nazis you'll start to feel uncomfortable seeing that script in general, even when it is perfectly innocuous.
Now if you want to listen to Tigrinya music — which I would definitely recommend, especially if you commute by train — the magic word is {ትግርኛ|tgrnya} {ሙዚቃ|muziqa}. The top result on YouTube is this bop.
- Yo thanks thats really cool info, I will have to check out the music. It is really unfortunate that my first exposure to this language is nazis. I recognized it as an african language because I have recently been learning a lot about constructed languages in africa and found it odd that I'd see so many nazis using it
  
  Conlangs in Africa? Please tell me more.
- I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
  yewtu.be
  inv.nadeko.net
  yt.artemislena.eu
  piped.video
huh. TIL I can identify Amharic by just looking at it. I have zero idea why nazis are speaking in it though
- If you look closely you'll see that it's the same block of text in both comments. I would assume that this is an attempt to confuse content moderation bots, who might be able to flag obvious antisemitism in English-language comments, but not in comments identified as being in a different language with a less developed content moderation system.
  
  Would make sense, given their many lazy prior efforts to subvert detection (the stupid babytalk garbage springs to mind)
  True losers
- By the way, not to burst your bubble, but this is Tigrinya, not Amharic. After a lot of straining to recall the letters I managed to read the words {ናይ|nay} {እርትራ|Ertra} which means "of Eritrea", and the word {ናይ|nay} is apparently found in Tigrinya but not in Amharic.
  I really wish I could've gotten further in Tigrinya than just basic phrases that I immediately forgot plus the word for "vaccination", but alas, there's unfortunately way more resources aimed at Tigrinya speakers learning English or Norwegian than the other way around, so I remain only knowing how to trial-and-error sound out words.
- I have zero idea why nazis are speaking in it though
  Bozos probably think it shields them from le censorship.
  
  I mean, it might? idk if it actually does
Here’s my theory:
TikTok’s language filters are especially aggressive, and so I think in this case they might be using it only because the existing language filters don’t cover that script? And then other nazis can just use google translate or whatever to convert it back. I don't know for sure, but this would kind of make sense to me.
- it's not about the content, pasting this at the end of their message just let's them say whatever they want without it getting deleted
Ethiopian
- Ethiopian is not a language. This is text in the Ge'ez script, also known as Fidel and Abugida, and known by Unicode as "Ethiopic text", however there is no Ethiopian language. The script is rather used to write languages such as Amharic and Tigrinya, spoken in both Ethiopia and Eritrea.
  Call me pedantic but I just think it's an important distinction to make, that the script is also used in Eritrea and that Ethiopia has way more than one national language, only some of which are written in the Ge'ez script.
Those are the Pokémon alphabet

18 comments