French messaging abbreviation was born on a numeric keypad, where every character cost a keypress, and it shows. The forms that survived are the ones that saved real effort. The ones that died are the ones that were clever.
Here is what is actually current, what is safe, and what will date you the moment you send it.
The core set
slt: salut, hi.
cc: coucou, a warmer hello, and specifically a friendly one. Not a work opener.
bjr: bonjour. Even here, the greeting is not optional, it is merely abbreviated.
mdr: mort de rire, dying of laughter. The French laugh. ptdr, pété de rire, is the stronger version.
tkt: t'inquiète, from ne t'inquiète pas. Don't worry, it's fine, leave it with me. Enormously useful and slightly dismissive by design.
jsp: je sais pas, I don't know, with the ne already gone as it is in all spoken French.
dsl: désolé, sorry.
bcp: beaucoup, a lot.
pk / pq: pourquoi, why.
qqn: quelqu'un, someone. Its sibling qqch is quelque chose.
auj: aujourd'hui, today. French speakers abbreviate this one because the full form is genuinely tiresome to type.
rdv: rendez-vous, an appointment. This one crossed into formal writing long ago and appears on official documents.
stp / svp: s'il te plaît and s'il vous plaît, and note that the tu and vous distinction survives even in abbreviation. Getting this pair wrong in a message is the same mismatch it would be out loud.
The ones that will date you
These were designed for a phone with nine keys and they went out with it.
koi29: quoi de neuf, what's new, read aloud as koi-deux-neuf. A brilliant piece of design and completely dead. Typing it now signals precisely one thing about your age.
a2m1: à demain, see you tomorrow, using deux and un. Same category.
biz: bises, kisses, as a sign-off. Not dead exactly, but it reads as an older register. bisous written out is what most people send now.
The rebus forms did not survive the arrival of full keyboards, because they saved keystrokes rather than letters, and full keyboards made keystrokes free.
What replaced them
Modern French messaging shortens by dropping vowels and by borrowing, rather than by playing with numbers.
bg: beau gosse, good-looking. Used as a compliment and as light mockery, depending entirely on who is typing.
askip: from à ce qu'il paraît, apparently. A recent formation and a good example of the current method: compress the phrase, keep the sound.
jpp: j'en peux plus, I can't take any more. Exhaustion, exasperation or delight, depending on context.
tjrs: toujours, always.
pcq: parce que, because.
And a large amount of unmodified English: nice, random, cringe, safe. French messaging borrows more readily than French speech does, and considerably more readily than the Académie would like.
The professional layer
French email has its own compressed sign-offs, and they are formal rather than casual.
Cdt: cordialement, the standard neutral French email closing. Abbreviating it is normal in internal mail and would be brusque to a client.
Bien à vous: warmer than cordialement and unabbreviated.
Bonne réception: acknowledging that you are sending something, used constantly and with no English equivalent.
The pattern is the reverse of German: French casual messaging abbreviates heavily while French professional email stays largely written out, and the one abbreviation that does appear, Cdt, is the formal one.
Why this is vocabulary and not noise
Because tkt is not derivable from any French you have studied. Neither is askip. They are compressions of spoken phrases, which means they encode the spoken language rather than the written one, and that makes them a genuinely good route into how French actually sounds.
Jsp teaches you that spoken French drops ne. Tkt teaches you that t'inquiète stands alone as a phrase. The abbreviations are honest about the language in a way the textbook is not.
How to learn them
Save the message and who sent it. Tkt = don't worry misses that it can also mean drop it. The message it arrived in tells you which.
Paste the full line into Translate. Abbreviated French is unlookupable word by word, and reconstructs easily from a sentence.
Then let repetition finish it. Thirty forms, all high frequency, done inside a month.
The short version
Type mdr, not lol. Learn tkt, jsp and askip, which carry most of the traffic. Match stp and svp to whichever pronoun you are already using.
And leave koi29 where you found it.
Got a French message that looked like a licence plate? Paste it into Vokabulo and keep the phrase behind it. Free to start on iPhone and iPad. 📲
