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 Friday December 28 2007

Wronglish

Today I was having coffee with a friend and we started talking about Konglish, Japlish, Singlish and got onto how there should be one term to express this for all languages. We ended up with wronglish. Of course to refer to a specific variety of English you could refer to your local variation whatever that may be. I like wronglish better than Engrish which brings up visions of Japanese speakers mangling English. At least with Wronglish it covers everyone from Russians to Germans to Koreans to Japanese.

I did a ghit search and came up with only 903 results so this word is not exactly in common use yet. The number one search result was the Urban Dictionary and the definition is similar but not the same and dates back to 2003:

the language spoken by immigrants who have not bothered to learn the correct english language

everyone who shops at best buy speaks wronglish and i cant understand them

So what exactly is your favorite wronglish word or expression?



Sean. inscribed these words of wisdom on Friday Dec 28, 2007 at 04:49 PM
Vocabulary |

Picture of gordsellar

gordsellar wrote 274 words  on  Sunday Dec 30, 2007  at  02:31 PM Korea (South)

Yeah, I got into this conversation the other night with someone who was trying to convince me that Konglish is a dialect, that Koreans understand one another perfectly well when using it, and it’s just us silly Anglophones who don’t “understand.”

Which may have some limited truth in the context we were discussing, which was how “buzzwords” get used in advertising, but what I held back from saying, for politeness’ sake, was that you certainly don’t want your airplane handling manuals written in a “dialect” like Konglish or some other form of Wronglish.

Anyway, we’re not the only ones who don’t always understand Konglish. Students coping with someone who speaks English at a considerably lower level than themselves, or even a few years apart in age, seem (in my experience) to really have to struggle to summon up any kind of meaning from what’s said. Which explains why in these cases so many times students revert to Korean to figure out what the hell the lowest-level member of the group is saying.

I think Konglish is fun, but yeah, I agree, it’s Wronglish, if for no other reason than that it’s too inconsistent to be an actual “dialect” and too underused to be even a “creole”—it’s just English spoken poorly. (Which isn’t a moral judgment: the French spoke by almost in my hometown would be poorly-spoken French, similarly. Not a dialect of French. Just messed-up French.)

BTW I replied to your most recent comment. Have you got an installation of Moodle I could look at? Maybe we can talk about it sometime. Now that I’m all but done with the semester’s work, that is…

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