Engrish is a slang term which, in its purest form, refers to poor-quality attempts by Japanese writers to create English words and phrases; whether in mistranslation of an original Japanese language text, or in an attempt to create an original text in the English language. The Japanese-specific terms Japlish and Janglish also exist, although they are much less common and typically considered more derogatory. It is also commonly used with reference to any oriental language, not necessarily Japanese.
Engrish is most often considered by English-speakers to be a humorous misuse of English. Engrish also refers to the deliberately careless or mistaken use of English words in advertising, for example, as an exotic embellishment. It is generally considered distinct from wasei-eigo, which refers to English-based coinages that have found common use in Japan but are unknown in English-speaking countries.
The term Engrish is a pun on Japanese and a few other East Asian languages that do not have separate sounds for R and L. In the case of Japanese, the R sound is pronounced with the tongue touching the hard palate behind the front teeth, so that it sounds halfway between an English speaker's L and R. Because Japanese does not have a separate equivalent for the English L, native Japanese speakers not fluent in English often confuse the two letters when they spell English words. Thus, some misspell "English" as "Engrish". An example of Engrish might therefore be an advertising poster which renders the common theatrical term "break a leg" as "break a reg", or confusion between "get rid of" and "get lid of".
Engrish instructions for a "Puzzle Ball" featuring the slogan "
LETS DECOMPOSE & ENJOY ASSEMBLING." (Found in
Oregon in
2003)
Engrish can also refer to the Japanese pronunciation of English loanwords or a Japanese dialect with a number of English loanwords. Because Japanese has only five vowels, few consonant clusters and no distinction between R and L, English loanwords are often pronounced in a manner that sounds unusual and even humorous to English speakers. For example, in spoken Japanese, guitarist Eric Clapton becomes Erikku Kuraputon, Australia becomes Ōsutoraria, and "McDonald's" becomes Makudonarudo, which is often further abbreviated to Makudo or Makku. Japanese uses over 600 imported English words in common speech, sometimes in abbreviated form. Examples are hankachi for "handkerchief", fōku for "fork", tēburu for "table", puroresu for "pro wrestling", and so on. The more outlandish and humorous the pronunciation change is, the more likely it is to be considered Engrish. It should be noted that even fairly logical English loanwords in Japanese will often sound foreign and unintelligible to an English speaker, such as the use of chīzu for "cheese" when taking a photograph. These pronunciation changes are linguistically systematic and are completely unrelated to the speaker's intelligence.
Engrish was once a frequent occurrence in consumer electronics product manuals, with phrases such as "to make speed up find up out document", but it is less frequent today. Another source of poor translation is an unchecked machine-produced translation, such as that from the Babelfish service or Google Language Tools.
Engrish features prominently in Japanese pop culture, as some young Japanese people consider the English language to be highly fashionable. Japanese has assimilated a great deal of vocabulary from the English language, and many popular Japanese songs and television themes feature disjointed phrases in English amongst the mostly Japanese lyrics. Japanese marketing firms helped to create this popularity, and have subsequently created an enormous array of advertisements, products, and clothing marked with English phrases that seem highly amusing and/or inexplicably bizarre to a native English speaker. These new English terms are generally short-lived, as they are used more fashionably than meaningfully.
In contrast to Engrish, the term Nihonglish is occasionally heard. It refers to the conceptual opposite of Engrish: badly pronounced and ungrammatical Japanese produced by a native English speaker. A typical example is pronouncing konnichiwa "con-KNEE-chee-wuh" as ordinary Americans do with the clear English rhythm. This term is often found among communities of Japanese language students where Japanese can be used sporadically in English conversation much as English is used among English students in Japan. The use of Nihonglish is usually intentional, and is done with a humorous or sarcastic intent. A heavy English accent is used, indicating supposed unfamiliarity with the rules of Japanese pronunciation.
Poor Chinese English (or a mixture of Chinese and English) is sometimes referred to as Chinglish. Whereas "Engrish" is generally not considered a pejorative term, on account of it often being intentional, "Chinglish" is much less neutral, implicitly ridiculing people whose native language is not English. In comparison, English speakers who embarrass themselves trying to speak other languages are sometimes described as embarazado.
Some idiosyncratic usages of English among a community that is largely bilingual (Spanglish, Yinglish, Franglais) have names with more neutral connotations, and are applied largely to people whose skills in English are more on par with those of the society in general.
The phrase "All your base are belong to us" from the game Zero Wing is a well-known example of Engrish. Another example is "Going faster is the system job" written on computer cooling-fans manufactured by a company called Titan. Engrish has featured in several episodes of the American animated series Southpark. In one such episode, the main characters play ninja accompanied by a ridiculous song, sung in Japanese, that featured the chorus "let's fighting love."
Engrish is occasionally employed deliberately for an amusing or exotic effect, just as Chinese characters or letters of the Greek or Faux Cyrillic are equivalently used in Western society (usually incorrectly) as a graphical embellishment. Similarly, in English, umlauts, accents, misspellings, and "o's with slashes" are added to give an exotic look to otherwise ordinary phrases like Mötley Crüe and Hägar the Hørrible (see heavy metal umlaut)— or Häagen-Dazs. See also French phrases used by English speakers for examples of distortion or deliberate change of meaning.
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Last updated: 08-15-2005 08:58:53
