• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

As for Paklish, Arif Khan, a writer for www.netvert.biz, says many Pakistanis think in Urdu and speak in English. He says an example of the mixture would occur if a young Pakistani phoned his American girlfriend and said, “My heart was wanting kay I talk with you.” (Kay in Urdu means that.)

Khan cites another example: a notice to a bank customer about a withdrawal of seventy-five rupees: “For issuing new cheque book we charge RS. 75/–. Yeh amount aap kay account mien debit kar dee gai thee.” At that point, a nervous customer might want to look for another bank and check the bank balance.

PORTUGLISH/PORGLISH

This is a lingo spoken (and written) not only in Portugal and Brazil but in areas of the United States by heirs of Portuguese immigrants going back hundreds of years. The areas include parts of California, Hawaii, and eastern Massachusetts.

Maria Angela Loguercio Bouskela, a native Brazilian doctor, says that in the last ten years English has become much more popular with Brazilians as they move up the economic ladder in tandem with the country’s economy. Travel to the United States has also increased substantially.10

Examples of Portuglish words that are similar to Spanglish are apontamento (appointment), atachar (attach), comutar (commute), deletar (delete), escore (score), friza (freezer), inicializar (initialize), resetar (reset), and scanear (scan).

However, the government passed a law in 1999 that forbids the use of foreign expressions in public documents. It was a reaction to the frequent use of American English terms such as boom, delivery, fast food, personal banking, rock, site, striptease, and videotape.

Portuguese Impressions, a blog on the WordPress website, provides additional examples of written Portuglish by exchange students from Brazil.

RUNGLISH

For nearly three centuries, Russians took the advice of Czar Peter the Great to “write everything in the Russian language, not making use of foreign words and terms.”

But everything changed after the fall of communism and the Soviet Union in the late 1980s. Suddenly the country became caught in the headlights of Western culture and business. At the time, Russians had few linguistic terms to deal with the rest of the world, so they simply transliterated English terms into Russian.

Feodor Bratenkov, a native of St. Petersburg, reports that “the number of Americanisms became so enormous that one needs many pages to write all of them.”11 They include such terms as offshore, roam, site, file, mixer, toaster, roast, shaker, bowling, skateboard, snowboard, biker, fitness, security, broker, teenager, parking, microvan, showroom, prime time, blockbuster, and multiplex.

Although Runglish (a.k.a. Ringlish or Russlish) has been kicked around for years by humorists, the first practical use of it was claimed by Russian astronaut Sergei Krikalyov, who reported that the mixture of Russian and English was used by him and his fellow astronauts in 2000 at the International Space Station. A similar scene occurs in Arthur C. Clarke’s novel, 2010: Odyssey Two, about a spaceship crew that started a “Stamp Out Russlish” drive.12

Brief Backlash

By 2007, Russian leaders had apparently had their fill of Americanisms. They declared it “the Year of the Russian Language,” hoping to stop young Russians from picking up and passing on words mostly from MTV, the international music channel. But Yuri Prokhorov, chief of the Russian State Institute of Foreign Languages, admitted at the time that there was no way to stop such a trend. A bigger problem, he added, was the failure of many Russians to use their own language properly.

By 2011, Bratenkov reported that Runglish had become even more prevalent. He said a random review of the Russian news agency news.ru.com revealed a headline saying in phonetic Russian that a supermarket chain named OKAY had shut down all its supermarkets in St. Petersburg. The story included Cyrillic spellings of supermarket, retailer, and top manager.

He says Runglish is especially prominent in the public relations field.