English isn’t the only language with elaborate online variations; and one language with an especially highly developed alternative online form is Russian. Since the late 1990s, an elaborate system known as Padonkaffsky jargon has been a feature of the Russian-language internet, fueled initially by intellectuals and academics, but today an integral part of Russian pop culture as a whole.
The name Padonkaffsky itself signifies the jargon used by so-called padonki—an online counter-cultural movement who named themselves after the plural of the Russian word padonok, a slang term for people of low status. The padonki first forged their jargon on marginal websites known for sometimes obscene content, with Padonkaffsky jargon relying on phonetic misspellings of Russian words combined with complex puns and tongue-in-cheek cultural references; techniques that constitute a truly international recipe for converting your native tongue into net-worthy jargon.
The nickname “Olbanian” for Padonkaffsky is itself a pun on the Albanian language (which has nothing to do with the jargon), and came to fame in a 2004 incident where an English-speaking user on the website LiveJournal complained about not being able to read some text, which was written in Padonkaffsky-influenced Russian.
Having forcefully asserted that everyone ought to be conducting discussions on LiveJournal in English—and been mischievously told that the language he couldn’t read was Albanian—the hapless user found himself bombarded with messages advising him to “learn Albanian!” as a satirical way of highlighting English-speakers’ inability to understand anything other than their own language, let alone jargon variations on other languages using non-Roman alphabets.122
“Learn Albanian!” rapidly went viral as a trend, becoming—in its Padonkaffsky form “Olbanian”—a rallying cry for Russian language and pop culture online, as well as a humorous stock response to anyone using incorrect grammar or talking nonsense. Soon, “Olbanian” had become a widely recognized alternative label for Padonkaffsky itself.
Sometimes written as !Olbanian! perhaps the most famous word in its vocabulary is preved, a deliberate misspelling of the word privet, an informal greeting. Preved became notorious as a Russian internet meme thanks to its appearance in a series of comically captioned pictures, beginning with a drawing of a bear interrupting a couple having sex, and culminating in sufficient public awareness for preved to be used as the main caption on a Russian advertisement for Newsweek magazine, complete with an excitable figure mimicking the bear’s posture.123
While it may sound bizarre, the “bear surprise” image, as it’s usually known, deserves a special mention. The image itself is a childlike watercolor painting by the American painter John Lurie and was originally captioned with the word “surprise.” Through the wonders of Olbanian, this became preved, while the bear himself earned the name “Medved.” Since its first appearance in 2006, Preved Medved has earned an astonishing level of recognition—further evidence, if it were needed, of the weird transnational power of web-fueled language games.124