Define "Alay"

If any of you readers are not from Indonesia (but have some friends that are from Indonesia), you may wonder at least once why the heck people write things like "aq ch4yanK kmUh" or any other sentences that use many numbers with too little vowels and combined with an excessive use of ..,,, and cApItALiZaTiOn.
Here, now, I want to write a little bit about alay.

I found a really interesting article here from a blogger about the definition of 4 popular terms that are easily found in Indonesian informal language: lebay, jayus, jablay, alay. It somehow inspired me to write a similar post about  just one specific term, alay.


As quoted there, in a very sophisticated way of describing, alay is:
an adj. describes the kind language that is too informal that is disdained by even most Indonesians nowadays, usu. refers to written language;
n. a person with shabby appearance and of uneducated impression, mostly refers to male who fits the description.

In Indonesian language, alay actually stands for anak layangan (kite's child). The reason why the word "kite" is used to explain all this hazy situation remains unknown. At least to me.

Alay has two meanings. Alay is what you may become if you write something that is barely understandable with some excessive use of unnecessary characters. Youngsters usually use the first type of alay to sound cute, for example:

I miss you (English)
Aku rindu kamu (formal usage of Indonesian)

Aku kangen kamu (informal usage)

aQ k4nG3n QmuuH..!!! (alay usage)

See the difference? The alay sentence may sound cute when you pronounce it. (Only if you know how to say it right!)

The second meaning of alay is like this: if you see a boy wearing a pair of tight skinny jeans, too tight that you wonder how he could even breathe, a statement T-shirt or a rock band T-shirt, preferably with tattoo or piercings, with hair that looks emo, he could be an alay at heart (even though this is not proven all the time). If you see a music channel on TV where there are a lot of audiences with familiar face (i.e. you see them almost every day in any music show in TV) that are dancing hyperbolically, they could be alay. And there are a lot of other examples of alay.

 If you think alay is a bad thing, it's not--it's simply just a different way of expressing self. You can't say that alay is disturbing just because you don't like being alay and you don't like any example of alay, because it's how other people show the way they are. There is nothing too hazardous about being alay, it's just being different. And being different is extremely, not a bad thing.