There’s no need to be a linguistics expert to guess the gibberish on Instagram. Just take a look at some of the posts and you’ll see that many of the symbols and words are misspelled or have strange meanings. But don’t worry, there are plenty of ways to decode Instagram’s gibberish without any prior knowledge of language. Here are five tips:

  1. Look for patterns: When you see a word repeated multiple times, it might be worth trying to figure out what it means by looking for patterns. For example, the word “dragon” is often used in pairs (e.g., “dragon ball,” “dragon age”), so it might make sense to look for similar patterns in other posts as well.
  2. Use context clues: If you can use context clues to help understand what someone is saying, you can easier guess their language when they post something in Instagram. For example, if someone is posting about going on a vacation and they mention “the beach,” you might be able to figure out that they’re talking about a trip to an oceanfront location.
  3. Try using emoji: If you don’t know how to say something in English, sometimes using emoji will help communicate the meaning better than writing it down. For example, if someone is posting a picture of them with an animal and they use the 🐧 symbol, you can probably assume that it’s a picture of an animal being killed or captured (or maybe just enjoying itself).
  4. Use context clues from other languages: Sometimes when people post in another language, their grammar or syntax might be different than what we’re used to in English speaking countries. So if someone is posting about going shopping in Japan and they use Japanese terms like “yakuza,” you can probably assume that this person is talking about underworld gangs in Japan (or maybe just some common shopping items).