Fake Arabic Used In Kendall Jenner's Pulled Pepsi Ad

Pepsi pulled a controversial ad starring Kendall Jenner on Wednesday, just one day after the commercial sparked a backlash on social media that accused the company of co-opting protest and social justice movements in order to sell a soft drink. But before the ad was removed, Arabic speakers noticed it also featured an attempt at Arabic that they said amounted to little more than gibberish.

The ad showed Jenner, of the Kardashian clan, at a photo shoot when she sees a generic protest passing by on the street. Jenner tears off a wig and wipes off her lipstick to join the march, and ends up giving a can of Pepsi to a police officer in a sequence that many pointed out bore resemblance to Iesha Evans' arrest at a Black Lives Matter protest in Baton Rouge last year. While Pepsi originally stood by the ad, which was created by the company's in-house advertising arm, it relented Wednesday. In a statement, the company said it "was trying to project a global a message of unity, peace and understanding," but that "we missed the mark."

Read: Pepsi Boycott: Kendall Jenner Ad Leads Consumers To Stop Buying

But while social media mocked the ad for implying Pepsi could somehow solve social problems, Arabic speakers noticed the ad also showed a protester holding a sign that seemed to be an attempt at Arabic, the fifth-most widely spoken language in the world. In much the same way the ad depicted a protest without actually communicating what the protest was about, it also tried to depict Arabic without actually using the language to communicate anything.

The Tumblr site "Nope, Not Arabic" tracks images used in media that are supposed to be Arabic, but are in fact not. The site posted a still from the commercial that showed a protester holding a sign with symbols on it that appears to be an attempt at spelling the Arabic word for "love."

Not only is the word not Arabic, because the letters are separated into two words by an unnecessary space, but the whole word is backwards. The mistake was most likely due to the fact that Arabic is read from right-to-left, not left-to-right like English and Romance and Germanic languages.