04.07.08
Do you speak Ponglish?
They pay ‘taksy’ to the government and spend ‘kesz’ going ‘szoping’ with their ‘frendy’– Poles in Britain speak Ponglish, a hybrid language that mixes Polish and English.
According to the Daily Telegraph, the new slang has turned into a secret language that angers older Poles who can’t understand it.
Even young people in Warsaw have adopted the migrant-speak, the Telegraph reported on Wednesday.
Magda Pustola from the Polish Cultural Institute in London said: “It’s absolutely common to blend words and phrases. We find that more and more English is creeping into our Polish."
Ponglish has its own entry on the Polish Wikipedia describing it as ‘a slang spoken by Poles in Great Britain and Ireland which gives Polish endings to English words or translates grammatical structures and idioms from English into Polish’.
Polish shopkeeper Aleksandra Mackiewicz confirmed that Ponglish has arrived in Bournemouth.
She said she noticed that her customers used work-related English terms such as being ‘busy’ having a ‘day off’ or ‘overtime’ in their Polish conversations.
She said: “It’s common everyday words. It’s just easier to say them in English. You don’t think about it.”
Miss Mackiewicz said in her experience the spelling of English words would not usually be changed.
More news
27.06.08 | Poles angry at Star slur
20.06.08 | Primary schools going bilingual
13.06.08 | "Euro orphans": One in ten Polish fathers has left