Teens Create Language of Pager-Speak

It's a secret language among friends.

It may look like a jumble of numbers and asterisks, but it's actually a growing lexicon of the mundane, offbeat and obscene.

While the language doesn't have a name, young people across the Southland and the nation rely on it to communicate those little messages that don't warrant a long conversation: "good night," "you're on my mind" or something decidedly less friendly.

Welcome to the world of pager-speak.

By dialing numbers that look vaguely like digital letters--right side up or upside down--the young linguists put together words and phrases.

"They're on the cutting edge," said Michael Haddad, of Soft-Cell Communications in Beverly Hills. "They're the ones inventing the uses of the pager."

And as young people, in their teens to their early 20s, become the fastest growing group of pager users, companies from Motorola to MTV scramble to cater to them.

"Young people today are absolutely using pagers as a way to stay in touch with their friends and with their families," said Caroline Mockridge, a spokeswoman for MTV, which is now selling pagers.

The way they stay in touch is by relaying a code that conveys a mix of standard phrases and slang.

Pasadena High School student Suzie Mouradian, 17, used to carry a frayed crib sheet around that decoded scores of numerical messages. When she started high school three years ago, students were just beginning to experiment with this new form of communication.

"I've had so many people ask me to write out sheets," Mouradian said. "Now I know people who page like 10 people good night."

Sometimes pager-speak is a local dialect understood only among a group of friends, but some of the beeper codes follow a logic understood across regional and school boundaries.

For example, the command "go home" is written 90*401773. In the digital world, 9 looks like g, 0s are obvious Os, 4 is a legless H, 1 next to two 7s approximates the shape of an M, and 3 is a backward E.

In Flushing, N.Y., Katrina Schultz, 17, spells good morning the same way people in the know do in Los Angeles. In the beginning, Schultz said, "I had to explain it to my boyfriend. I had to give him a list of which numbers stand for which letters."

But the code is not limited to English.

In San Marcos in north San Diego County, Tania Vergara, 18, pages her friends in Spanish. After she types the phone number where she is, she leaves the numbers 50538, which if rotated upside down resembles the word besos, or kisses.