波兰式英语 PONGLISH

xp2

Polish is becoming more and more prone to influences from foreign languages, but none more so than from English, the world’s lingua franca. Over the years a new breed of Polish has arisen due to this mix. It’s called Ponglish, and it’s spoken by thousands of Polish people across the globe. John Beauchamp has this story Polish has had a history of borrowing words from other languages, not just English. Words such as ‘hochsztapler’, and ‘krawat’ come from German and French respectively, and the past years have seen a major increase in the use of English, as Doctor Urszula Chowaniec, a teacher of Polish literature, states: “Now, when we are in the European Union, when the English language is a global one, the influence of English is actually visible on any language in Europe, and has been for a long time on Polish, especially as we have a lot of migration and there are a lot of people coming to England from Poland.” As more and more Poles have gone to live in English speaking countries, and not just since Poland joined the European Union, a new language has emerged, coined ‘Ponglish’, a somewhat amusing name, for a somewhat amusing tongue. “Ponglish is one of those things that if you are in America, you live in a Polish community, you actually can’t get away from. - Can you give me some examples of Ponglish that you use in your family, or within the Polish community where you’re from? There’s really so many of them, the basic one is ‘shower’, you say ‘shower’, because in Polish, why would you say ‘prysznic’, ‘garbage’ […] There’s also ‘cara’, ‘cara na cornerze’…” “Absolutely it was very frequent, I was in the Polish community in Sheffield, I knew lots of people so mixing English and Polish came totally naturally to us. For example ‘dać lifta – can you give me a lift’, ‘w jakim shopie to kupiłeś? – in which shop did you buy something’, using words like ‘w markecie’, so down at the market, or ‘w supermarkecie’, before they were used in Poland.” Both Anna Bieńkowska and John Walczak know the importance of speaking Ponglish fluently, whether it be in either the British or American variants. But actually in Poland the language has also started to take off, as Justyna Majchrzak, a presenter of a language show on Polish Radio Euro, deliberates: “I was thinking about what words exist in Polish and are taken from English. I think that there are mainly words connected with modern technology, like ‘film’, ‘radio’, ‘telefon’, and ‘komputer’. I say ‘save’uję’, which means ‘I save files’, and ‘surfuję’, which means I am surfing the internet, ‘backupuję’…” Other computer terms which need no translation include ‘debugować’, ‘update’ować’, ‘uploadować’, with the omnipresent ‘pendrive’ dangling from everyone’s keyring. But even though Polish has taken on so many words from English, is it becoming a real problem, or just evolution? Doctor Urszula Chowaniec: “Well, I’m aware of the fact that a lot of people complain about this especially linguists, they think that it is very problematic, that the Polish language is losing its purity and so on, the Polish that young people especially have started to speak is very clumsy and incorrect, I think we should be aware of certain things, like that a lot of constructions used in Polish are English, so we shouldn’t say them. But I’m actually very optimistic: I think language has its own life and whatever the linguists say, ‘no don’t do it, don’t say it!’, language has its own life, its own dynamic.” Polish may be the next victim of Anglicisation, yet Polish grammar will always get in the way, no matter how hard you try. Maybe that is the secret to the language after all. With eight noun cases, not forgetting the vocative of course, two verb aspects and a whole host of suffixes, prefixes, maybe even some infixes that can be attached to almost any verb, linguists maybe shouldn’t be too worried that Polish is simply accumulating a new vocabulary, because the grammar is here to stay. And maybe it’s the grammar which holds the national identity, rather than the lexicon.

chenshu

po-ra-nglish

concs

:tk_09 :tk_09

rickzhao

就直接变英语得了