As a freelancer I recently got in contact with a russian agency on LinkedIn. This person used the 'russian-style smile face' ) quite a lot.
In order to sympathize with this person I was tempted to use it too. Would it be okay to use it as a non-russian-speaking person, or does it seem unauthentic?
:)
is that:
is on theж
key in Russian keyboard, which makes:)
being used by Russians noticeably less frequent than the rest of the world. If anything, you may notice Russians sometimes use=)
when you'd expect a:)
. That also warrants why a simple)
is used instead of a:)
. As you can see, this way to write a smiley is originated in Russian typing and caused by saving time switching between English and Russian characters. I guess that as a primarily English/German (?) keyboard user switching from:)
to)
is not really something that's expected from you.