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Young Chinese are very computer oriented and like to show off the latest American words acquired from the Internet or television. According to Beijing native Yi Han, almost any new U.S. product, technology, or idea is immediately accepted by its English name or acronym, such as MP3, iPod, Wi-Fi, and DVD, or transliterated into pinyin, which uses Western letters for Chinese characters.

Some transliterations can sound quite ingenious. Han cites bo ke for blog; ji in for gene (literally, “basic code”); kao bei for copy; hei ke for hacker (literally, “black guest”); fen si for baseball fans (literally, “thin rice noodles that wrap around other food”); and sai bai wei for Subway, the restaurant chain (literally, “compete with hundreds of tastes”). Matthew Michaelson, an American expert in Chinese literature, adds the Mandarin word for T-shirt: t-xue, pronounced “tee shir.”

DANGLISH

English is Denmark’s first foreign language and is spoken by nearly everybody in this tiny country. Dorte Lonsmann of Roskilde University says her research on the computer game culture there in 2007 indicated that young Danes frequently code-switch from Danish to English.4

Lawrence White, a native Brit who runs a language translation and learning center in Denmark, says English there is frequently influenced by the rules of Danish itself, often resulting in good but slightly odd English. For example, instead of asking what something looks like, a Dane is likely to say, “How does it look like?” because the same question in Danish starts with the word for how.

Meanwhile, many English words are finding a place in Danish, such as deadline, computer, and chance. White adds that universities and business schools in Denmark conduct many international courses in English, and that accompanying textbooks are available only in English.5

DENGLISH

Denglish, or Denglisch, as the Germans spell it, has been extremely popular in Germany for years. It is exemplified especially in technical terms, such as “rebooting a computer because the software crashed,” a phrase that comes out as “rebooten den computer weil die software gecrasht ist.”

Young Germans especially like American terms, which they often transliterate. For example, they may refer to coole events or use gansta rap terms such as phat, which they spell “fett.”

Wikipedia describes a whole category of English words that are given meanings in German that differ from their meanings in English. Among such words, with their German meaning in parentheses, are dressman (male model), drive-in (drive-through) evergreen (a golden oldie), fitness studio (gym), oldtimer (classic car), parking (parking garage or lot), smoking (tuxedo or dinner jacket), street worker (social worker), timer (calendar or appointment book), trampen (hitchhiking), and wellness-hotel (spa).

Free-flowing writing often adds spice to Denglish. In his blog on what he calls Germanglish, Johannes Ernst describes an invitation from VDI, an engineering organization, to a conference. It listed one speaker’s topic as “Fright traffic and passanger services between different interests.” On the subject of visiting a Mercedes plant, the brochure recommended, “Please register for the visitation in the registration form attached.”6

Pennsylvania Dutch

An earlier type of language mongrel called Pennsylvania Dutch has been spoken for centuries by some 200,000 German-Americans in Pennsylvania and a few other states. The name of the dialect comes from the German word Deutsch. Here are some samples of this type of Amglish:

Throw father down the stairs his hat.

Father ain’t so good; his eatin’s gone away and he don’t look so good in the face either.

Ve get too soon oldt und too late schmart.

Go out and tie the dog loose and don’t forget to outen the light.

DUNGLISH

Dunglish has been piling up for many years in tiny Holland, this mostly flat land of dikes and canals. It’s a kind of middle English—or should we say “muddle”—that speak and write the Dutch in a manner malaprop. They know the English words but