Pseudo-Anglicisms: Loanwords English Doesn't Need Back

A great bit of footing.

In the past, we've looked at loanwords that have made their way into English from many different languages, including Russian, Hawaiian, and Malay. Of course, plenty of languages have also borrowed English words with varying degrees of success. These words sometimes remain unchanged from the original English version and keep the same spelling and meaning. However, there are also loanwords that have nothing to do with their English incarnations, which are known as pseudo-anglicisms.

Today we're going to show you a few of our favourite words that went from English into another language and got a bit lost along the way.

If you speak German, you might be familiar with the world Air-Condition. While it's clear that this word means "air-conditioning", it still sounds very peculiar if you speak English as your first language. The same goes for shampooing in French, which is not a verb, but rather the noun for "shampoo".

French, just like Romanian, likes to use baskets to refer to trainers or sneakers, whereas Spanish and Portuguese borrowed the English word "tennis" and changed it to tenis and tênis respectively.

While basketball is quite popular, borrowing the word in its entirety is not. Several languages, including French, have taken "basket" to refer to the sport. Footing is also a popular pursuit in French, Italian and Spanish... Never heard of it? In English, we call it "jogging".

Some tents in a camping.

When you go camping, you stay in a campsite. If you go camping in a country that speaks Croatian, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Italian, Polish, Romanian, Russian, or Spanish, you stay in a camping. Do you want to park your car in a "car park" or a "parking lot"? In Arabic, Flemish, French, Swiss German, Greek, Italian, Polish, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, and Spanish, it can sometimes simply be called a parking.

The trend of adding the -ing suffix to English words doesn't end there. Lifting actually refers to a "facelift" in a number of different languages. Arabic, German, Polish, Serbo-Croatian, and Spanish also sometimes use marketing to refer to "advertising", which is of course related to marketing, but doesn't cover all types of marketing.

A number of a languages like to call a tuxedo or suit jacket a smoking. This comes from the English term "smoking jacket", but does away with the most important part for English speakers, with "smoking" developing its own meaning in its new language.

My last pseudo-anglicism is zapping, I absolutely love this word. It means channel-hopping or channel-surfing in Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, and Swedish and has given rise to a number of TV shows that replicate that very idea without you ever having to touch the remote!

What are your favourite pseudo-anglicisms? Are there any words from your language that English has borrowed in a nonsensical way? Tell us about them all in the comments below!

Independence Day: The Languages Of Ukraine

Although the declaration of sovereignty took place on 16 July 1990 with the first actual celebration on the same date in 1991, today's date now celebrates Ukraine's independence from the USSR in 1991. In honour of this day we've decided to celebrate by taking a look at the languages of Ukraine.

The Crimean Peninsula

Major Slavic Languages

Ukrainian is the official language of course, with around 65% of the population speaking it. Russian, however, is spoken as the native language of nearly a third of Ukrainians. Though it holds no official status, many more people speak it as a second language, since it is often used for communication across large portions of the country.

Aside from these two main languages that make up the significant majority of the population, there are several other languages with a significant number of speakers such as Polish, which has over 1,000,000 speakers.

Germanic and Romance Languages

Ukraine is home to the largest number of Eastern Yiddish speakers in the world, over 600,000 in total. As a result, the language held official status in Ukraine for a period of three years between 1918 and 1921.

Romanian boats over 600,000 speakers as well and is another of the languages spoken in Ukraine with more than half a million native speakers.

Beautiful wheat fields in Ukraine.

More Slavic Languages

Rusyn, a language that is considered by some to be a dialect of Ukrainian, also has over half a million speakers, though that really depends on whether it's a language or a dialect. It is also spoken in parts of Slovakia, Poland, Hungary, and Romania. 

Ukraine also has over 400,000 speakers of Belarusian, which unsurprisingly is also a language of Belarus.

The Turkic Language

Perhaps the most interesting language spoken in Ukraine is Crimean Tatar, which has just over a quarter of a million speakers. Crimean Tatar is considered a native language of Ukraine and is quite sporadically spread across the globe. It is a Turkic language that currently enjoys official language status in a regional capacity in both Ukraine and Romania.

Do you plan to celebrate Ukraine's Independence Day or know any festive terms in these languages? Let us know in the comments below.

La Fête nationale du Québec: The Languages of Quebec

Today is the National Holiday of Quebec, or La Fête nationale du Québec as it is called in French, Quebec's only official language. It is also the Catholic holiday of St. John the Baptist Day, and it's no secret that there's a good historical and cultural significance of Catholicism when it comes to the Québécois, French Canadians, and French Americans.

Despite the legal status of the French language, Quebec has had its fair share of controversy when it comes to the influence of English. Around 80% of the population speaks French as their first language, and over 97% of those in the province can speak the language.

The Parliament Building in Quebec City

Even though English is clearly the minority language with less than 8% of those in Quebec speaking it as a first language, many concerns have arisen as it is believed by some that the French language is at risk from the ever-encroaching English language that represents a tiny minority. The "pastagate" scandal has raised some eyebrows, but that's not what Quebec is about.

After the battling between Canada's two most prominent languages is over, Quebec is left with a respectable number of Arabic, Spanish, and Italian, speakers. After that, there's Chinese, Berber, Portuguese, Romanian, Vietnamese, and Russian, though none of these languages have huge numbers of speakers in Quebec.

The native peoples in Quebec account for around 71,000 people, of which nearly half speak an Aboriginal language as their first language. The languages spoken by this group are mostly from the Algonquian language family, a group of languages that originally covered a large portion of North America, from the East Coast to the Rocky Mountains through what is now Canada and the northern states of the US.

A smaller number of natives speak Iroquoian languages, which originally were found in areas around southern Quebec, Ontario, and in the US, from what is now Upstate New York to further afield, including modern-day Maryland, North Carolina, and Tennessee. Of course, this was all before European contact and the colonisation of North America, so the distribution of these languages has changed quite considerably since then.

On the Northern side of the province one can find, unsurprisingly, Eskimo-Aleut languages. Currently there are relatively few speakers, while the pre-colonial distribution of these languages reads like a map of places you wouldn't want to go if you prefer to spend your holidays on the beach sipping a margarita.

The EU And Its Languages: Part 2

Yesterday we saw a brief history of the EEC which later became the EU, the countries that formed it and the languages they brought with them. Today we'll be continuing our little history lesson with the Maastricht Treaty, the formation of the EU and countries that became members and brought their cultures and languages with them.

The Colonel Building in the
Dutch city of Maastricht. 

The Maastricht Treaty was signed in 1992 and formally created the European Union. Three years later Austria, Sweden and Finland all joined the club. Austria had little to no worries when it came to linguistic recognition as German had been a permanent fixture since the creation of the EEC. Sweden and Finland, however, led to Swedish and Finnish being added as official languages.

It would take another nine years before the EU would allow any more nations into the community, but when it did it would be the largest expansion to date. On May 1st of 2004, Cyprus, Malta, Slovenia joined, as well as seven former members of the Eastern Bloc: Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Slovakia. Czech, Estonian, Hungarian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Polish, Slovak and Slovene all became official languages.

Three years later in 2007, Bulgaria and Romania became EU member states and Bulgarian and Romanian became official languages. Irish also finally gained its official status, no less than 14 years after Ireland joined the EU.

With five years having passed since the last the enlargement, Croatia is due to accede at some point this year and will no doubt bring with it its native language, Croatian.