Talk:Engrish

This article was nominated for deletion on 2004-09-20. The result of the discussion was keep.

Non-standard?

It's not "non-standard" English. This implies that it is abnormal, but still correct. A better description would be "Crappy English" or simply "Wrong English". 98.238.188.211 (talk) 01:10, 20 March 2009 (UTC)

Why does wikipedia have an Engrish article in the first place? This is the second weirdest article I've read on this site so far, before that Buffalo buffalo Buffalo one. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 207.108.245.195 (talk) 20:58, 13 January 2011 (UTC)

How is it wrong? Technically, American english is "wrong" in light of British english since American English breaks some rules that Engrish does too. It's a dialect which doesn't mean it's right or wrong, just different. Oh and "crappy" is your opinion. I could just as easily call American english crappy compared to british english. It's just a dialect.Yialanliu (talk) 03:14, 23 March 2009 (UTC)

A set of mistakes made by non-native speakers does not a dialect make. It has no internal consistency; you can't really put together a coherent grammar of Engrish the way you can with, say, African-American Vernacular English. — Gwalla | Talk 18:04, 25 March 2009 (UTC)

Sorry, but using a comparison of British English to American English when discussing Engrish is just plain lame, and seems to be a case of "there is no such thing as wrong, only different" taken to a "I don't wan't to offend anyone" extreme. Anyone who has been to Japan and witnessed the ubiquitous, and uproariously hilarious, Engrish would not even try to make a case that it is simply another dialect of English. Claiming it is is akin to me pasting random French words everywhere and then according such randomness the status of French dialect. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 74.141.154.118 (talk) 05:56, 20 January 2012 (UTC)

Japlish

Does Japlish have an established meaning? (Some use it as "mixed usage of Japanese and English" and others use it as "Engrish". But very few seem to use it as "Gairaigo" as described in the article.)Jirou (talk) 09:35, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

Gairaigo has a clear meaning, but the practice is a little more ambiguous. Speaking from experience, it often happens that a Japanese person believes that a loan word is actually correct English, rather than a loanword that has been adopted into Japanese. The "cool" image of English makes presentations of it seem an example of Engrish to native English speakers, although this is not helped by anglophones resident in Japan in particular often speaking poor Japanese, and so themselves not knowing what is an attempt at English, and what is a loan word. VsevolodKrolikov 12:43, 3 May 2009 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by VsevolodKrolikov (talk • contribs)

Third image ( File:AntiJapanesePropagandaTakeDayOff.gif ) not relevant

File:AntiJapanesePropagandaTakeDayOff.gif

I don't see any noticeable Engrish in that poster.--Tyranny Sue (talk) 07:56, 25 June 2009 (UTC)

Me neither. Exploding Boy (talk) 16:03, 25 June 2009 (UTC)

Whoops - sorry - reverted before I saw the talk page, which was a bit naughty of me. Anyway, it's grammatically Engrish (droppped article, and perhaps the overuse of "please" in requests/commands). And it's of historical note. VsevolodKrolikov (talk) 03:01, 26 June 2009 (UTC)

Sorry if my removal of the image seemed premature.

Three major signs that it's not Engrish:

1) It was created around 1940, before the word 'Engrish' existed.

2) The text is "Go ahead please - TAKE DAY OFF!". If it was Engrish, it would at least spell please 'prease'. And a single dropped article does not make it Engrish. (Also, one use of "please" is hardly 'overuse'!)

3) It was written by native English speakers. If anything it's a *very* mild case of sarcastic pseudo-Engrish (though, again, the term 'Engrish' is anachronistic in terms of the poster's age).

The image really doesn't illustrate the concept of Engrish at all, and doesn't help this article in any way. (Perhaps it would work well on an article about US War propaganda?) --Tyranny Sue (talk) 10:10, 26 June 2009 (UTC)

On reflection I think you're right. I don't think your first and second reasons are that strong - phenomena can exist before names take hold for them, and that not every aspect of Engrish is in a phrase does not make it not Engrish. However, I think you're right to say its anachronistic. Engrish comes out of the position of English as the dominant global language, which didn't really take place until after the second world war and the dominance of the US politically and culturally in the region. So I've reverted.VsevolodKrolikov (talk) 02:26, 29 June 2009 (UTC)

This needs a complete re-write

This article is a bit poor at the moment.

It needs to have clearer definitions of the different meanings of the term Engrish. In particular, it should really only be limited to examples of what appear to be attempts at English, but are not simply the mistakes of an East Asian learner of English (although such issues can explain the nature of some examples of Engrish). In particular, loan words and false cognates (such as petto bottoru) are not Engrish - they're Japanese plain and simple. Just as sushi is an English word, that doesn't actually just mean raw fish in Japanese, and the English word sumo is not part of a phenomenon called Nihonglish because it's pronounced significantly differently from Japanese.

Oh, and the Nihonglish section needs to go. OR all the way.VsevolodKrolikov (talk) 14:51, 31 July 2009 (UTC)

agreed. This article is a big pile of original research.1 source and 1 note for such an article is not remotely enough.--Crossmr (talk) 01:47, 2 August 2009 (UTC)

External links

The "External links" section of the article has been tagged for inappropriate or excessive linking. I have checked each link, and found many of them were only marginally relevant. Some did not refer to Engrish as such, even if they were not totally unrelated. Some were links to web pages where there was just a little bad English somewhere, if you looked hard enough. I have pruned the links down considerably, and I think what is left is more than sufficient to illustrate the topic. JamesBWatson (talk) 13:02, 25 August 2009 (UTC)

Japlish.

Half of this article is about "Japlish". It has its own article.  Aar  ►  23:37, 30 August 2009 (UTC)

Likely due to engrish.com, which started as a site listing weird English found in Japan. ···日本穣^? · 投稿 · Talk to Nihonjoe 01:19, 19 October 2009 (UTC)

Non-East-Asian use of "Engrish"

I've been using the term "Engrish" to describe English of non-native speakers of non-East-Asian origin (more specifically, European and Mideastern languages). I wonder if there are other such uses out there. 192.12.88.7 (talk) 16:16, 2 October 2009 (UTC)

I've heard "Spanglish" used to describe the pseudo-English used by many Latino immigrants in the United States. ···日本穣^? · 投稿 · Talk to Nihonjoe 01:19, 19 October 2009 (UTC)

Offensive...

This article is horribly offensive. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.40.233.145 (talk) 08:44, 20 October 2009 (UTC)

Really? It's factual. There's only so much you can do to sugar-coat a truth that some people find offensive. The article has a "Nihonglish" section which is a term used to describe the equivalent mistakes by non-Japanese (usually English language native) speakers of Japanese - I don't find that offensive in the slightest. However, it's clear that the situation crops up so much more in countries like Japan because there are far more English translations made there and the language is so different from English. And the trend of arbitrarily and randomly inserting English text produced by obviously extremely poor speakers into J-POP music simply serves to make the whole thing more funny, ridiculous and well-known outside of Japan. I mean, if I was writing a song with lyrics, I wouldn't add Japanese lyrics (not without at least running them by a native or at least fluent Japanese speaker which I know I'm not), or Hindi or Icelandic or whatever other language. Plus a lot of the worst examples of Japanese Engrish are from public signs which have clearly been translated by a machine, which is also hilarious, especially when the resulting translations are littered with obscenities and demonstrating that the "translator" made practically no effort at all to check the quality of their work and perhaps just pasted the source text into Babelfish or Google Translate and used the results directly. Face it - it's funny! Destynova (talk) 16:25, 1 January 2010 (UTC)

This all stems from English being used as the de facto business language of the world... do you really think Japan, China and other non-English speaking countries want to make the effort to learn English and use English signs if that weren't the case? Much like in Britain and America we are extremely arrogant in refusing to learn non-English languages, (see the Dora the Explorer talk page to see what I mean) the non English, non native speakers have been "forced" to do so out of necessity. The English speakers would be ridiculed in greater levels if the situation was reversed, e.g. if Chinese was the de facto business language of the world instead. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.111.120.73 (talk) 20:53, 31 January 2010 (UTC)

I also think that calling this phenomenon "Engrish" is an attempt by Caucasian native-English speakers to coin and popularize another Asian stereotype. Face it, it's a small group of patronizing Westerners who are having a big laugh at the Asian-biased "Engrish" moniker, and I can see how it would offend Asians. The term should be renamed since the supposed point of the movement is to produce amusing examples of WRITTEN, not spoken, English grammar and vocabulary from all around the world.114.148.228.146 (talk) 03:32, 9 September 2010 (UTC)

It appears in the academic literature, and in Japanese academic literature at that, like this [example]. In Japanese there is the term "wasei-eigo", which I've never noticed anyone Japanese objecting to. What I think you (inadvertently) raise is that this article really needs some better sourcing.VsevolodKrolikov (talk) 03:56, 9 September 2010 (UTC)

Seriously, it must be a pretty miserable life when you are seemingly looking for reasons to get offended. The notion that Engrish is an attempt to "coin an popularize another Asian stereotype" sounds like the boilerplate you would read in a bad social sciences graduate thesis. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 74.141.154.118 (talk) 06:02, 20 January 2012 (UTC)

Uninformative

This article includes numerous pictures of what most people understand as "Engrish", i.e. people who can't speak the language attempting to write it for tourists' use or other. However the text of the article is about the insertion of English into Asian languages, as an affectation, and vice versa. It goes no way to explain the reasons for which English is commonly misused in East Asia especially, for example, it could highlight the presumably great grammatical and syntactical differences which are not as significant between European languages or Asian languages themselves. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 129.67.138.111 (talk) 15:29, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

source

This article sites urbandictionary.com as a source. That's some great research right there.... 2CrudeDudes (talk) 14:54, 5 April 2010 (UTC)

Without any valid sources there is no reason for this article to exist. "Engrish" is a derisive slang and nothing more. Someone man up and delete this worthless waste of bandwidth. 189.100.232.118 (talk) 15:05, 16 April 2010 (UTC)

I removed urbandictionary and inserted a better explanation that mildly implies the term is racist. I believe the article itself is probably notable, but chiefly as a Western Internet phenomenon. 80.221.34.183 (talk) 14:14, 20 April 2010 (UTC)

Issues

The article's refereneces to Eihongo have been removed, though Eihongo still redirects here. Also, shouldn't this article make a distinction between Engrish (ie mistakes like all your base are belong to us) and Japlish (ie deliberate and artistic uses of nonsense English? Serendi^podous 16:15, 7 May 2010 (UTC)

Serendipodous, we can make a clear distinction if the literature makes a distinction (otherwise we're doing OR). Luckily, I've just found this article which reflects on the conceptual difference, while suggesting that the outcome is often not much difference in terms of "correctness". It's been a while since I last looked at this article. A lot has been taken out which was simply poorly sourced (such as the impact of machine translation). I'm going to have a go at making this article better.VsevolodKrolikov (talk) 06:13, 9 September 2010 (UTC)

Good RS

Chinese government is making a move to solve the problem of Engrish lol http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2010/12/21/china_bans_use_of_english_and_chinglish_in_media The Resident Anthropologist (talk) 03:21, 24 December 2010 (UTC)

INCOME STATUS

IS THERE ANY RESEARCH INTO INCOME STATUS AND ENGLISH LEVREL WITH PEOPLE FROM THIS AREA? I ASSUME RICHER PEEPALAGE WOULD SPEAK BETTER ENGLISH. AND ALSO IF THEY ARE CHRISTIAN THEY SHOULD MAKE MORE MONEY AND SPEAK BETTER ENGLISHES> ANYWAY< ANYONE HAVE THE RIZZLE DIZZLE ON SOME RESEARCH HERE THERE GUYS? DUZZLEGOUCHE (talk) 06:01, 14 February 2012 (UTC)