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Hilarious errors on signs and directions in pseudo-English have become so common around the world, especially in China, that they have inspired a large number of fictional works rather than accurate reporting, especially on the Internet. The possibilities are endless.

But the genuine blending of languages with each other is even more fascinating because it is predominantly a natural process that can lead in many directions. One of the sharpest observers of this phenom is Jug Suraiaya, a satirist for the Times of India. In 1999, he wrote about how English itself is often mixed in his own country:

Like an indefatigable bindlestiff (tramp, US) or a haggler (itinerant pedlar, West Indian), the English language roams the world, selling its wares and pinching words from other languages, leaving behind a brood of linguistic offspring: Amglish (American English), Windlish (West Indian) and our very own Hinglish.

He proceeds to list various verbal blends popular in India: footfall (number of people entering a shop during a certain time), croning (a celebration to honor an older woman), and ohnosecond (the moment you realize you’ve made a mistake by pressing the wrong computer button.1

This chapter is a summary of linguistic mixtures, with names that show a blending of English with various national languages, many of which have already been described to some extent earlier in this book. Not included, with one exception, are local and regional dialects or creoles, such as the French-Spanish creole of Louisiana, which are such thorough mergers of languages that the sources of words are not easily recognizable. The exception is Pennsylvania Dutch.

Spanglish is an example of a well-known “lish.” A resident of Madrid may use it to parquear his car near a Starbucks so he can surfear the Web on his laptop. Likewise, a native of Paris might use a bit of pure Frenglish to buy les chicken nuggets at a local McDonald’s, while a Roman signorina plans to stoppare at an Internet cafe to fastforwardare her computer input.

Most of the lishes described here have been mentioned earlier in this book but without the additional details that follow. All are part of the extended Amglish family.

A MIXED BAG

It is not always easy to categorize each type of verbal mixture because it may be a combination of portmanteaus, loan words, or other types of merging one language with another. It could also be like the airport sign, whose writer didn’t know which words to borrow and where they fitted.

But most of the traffic in lishes is oral, often making spelling more of a guessing game than it already is. To help with that, we are already seeing the first wave of books devoted to individual lishes, such as Ilan Stavans’s book on Spanglish, which contains a large glossary.

The lishes described in this chapter are among the more prominent of many. The sheer number and the speed with which they have circled the globe without much press notice clearly indicate that Amglish—in all its forms—is destined to become even more of an international language.

There isn’t room in a small book to describe all these linguistic mongrels. Perhaps such a compilation is another book, even an encyclopedia. But no story about today’s international lingua franca would be complete without citing this extensive, ongoing, unique development. There are perhaps dozens more in the process of forming. See www.amglish.org.

Of course all languages are constantly rubbing up against others and absorbing or discarding volatile parts. What’s different today is the acceleration of the process and the ever-ready presence of American English.

INTO THE GRAND MIXER

The process resembles a huge Cuisinart with all languages constantly spinning around to separate the useful parts from the others. No one can adjust the speed, control the ingredients, or stop the process. Eventually new languages and dialects are formed, while others slide away.

In fact, it is becoming common to hear people frequently shift from one language or dialect to another and