Anyone who have ever had an online conversation with Russian people noticed that they have a tend to use brackets instead of proper smileys. Moreover, the quantity of the brackets can tell a lot about the emotions and mood of your Russian pen-friend. But what is odd is that very often Russians use brackets in the end of every sentence, because it seems that without the emoticons their sentences look rude or mean. I see irony in this, as it’s believed that Russians don’t smile in regular life, but online they are the most friendly folk! 

One bracket in the end of the sentence means that your interlocutor is just friendly. 

Two or three brackets usually mean that a person actually has a smile on their face. But sometimes it’s just politeness and your Russian interlocutor still wears Russian smile on their face. 

If you see more than three brackets it means that something is funny… or again it’s supposed to be funny and the person doesn’t actually laugh, you never know. 

So, why do Russians particularly use brackets? First of all, it’s a trend. When the majority of people do that, one gives up and participate in this too. The second reason is Russian keyboard format. In English in order to type the “eyes” (the colon) one needs just to press shift and the button next to L, but in Russian there is a lot of work to do: one needs to press shift and 6. Therefore it’s much easier to press shift and 0 to get as much ))))) as we want. *evil laugh* :)

After all Russian language has a plenty of long words, not like in German, but still. Therefore, we like shortening words. We are used to this since school, because it’s unreal to write down all the teacher’s speech otherwise. I believe this habit turned into something more and now we shorten Internet symbols as well.

The other issue is when Russians, particularly the young ones go too far with that. They literally communicate like this (no exaggerating):

- Hey)))) I checked into a hospital today((((((( I broke my arm((((( But the football was great))))))))))

I get ripples in my vision when I see this amount of Russian emoticons. Luckily I can’t say this about all of the Russians. Most of them are ok with using just a couple of brackets in a message!