Move over, Esperanto - Poles in Britain are speaking Ponglish. From The Telegraph:
Just as French and English combined to form Franglais, the Polish have their own linguistic cocktail: Ponglish.
The slang takes in everything from taxes – taksy – to driving, whose Ponglish equivalent, drajwnic, seems unlikely until it is pronounced: driveneech.
Those Ponglish drivers, of course, are sure to take care around "kornerze" on the "strity" while in the "kara".
After a hard day's work, what better than a chat with some "frendy"?
A spot of old school romance, on the other hand, seems less likely, with precious little magic in the Ponglish phrase "miec sex".
"We mix the two languages together all the time," said Magda Pustola, from the Polish Cultural Institute in London. "It's absolutely common to blend words and phrases. We find that more and more English is creeping into our Polish even in meetings at the institute."
Some Polish workers in the UK report that the slang has become a secret language that infuriates older Poles back home who can't understand what they are saying.
But in Warsaw, young Poles are quickly adopting the new vocabulary.
There people are already "szoping" (shopping) for clothes, such as a 'tiszert', or going for a 'drinkowac' at the pub, presumably with a 'lajtowy' or light, easy going person.
In a Times article not available online, Ben MacIntyre argues that Ponglish is a pidgin:
Unsurprisingly, given the industry of the newcomers, most Ponglish words refer to working, driving, paying taxes, lunch breaks and drinking. An editorial in The Daily Telegraph sniffed that words in Ponglish "exude an aroma of low commerce and lower consumerism". True, Ponglish is not the stuff of high culture, but most pidgins are constructed this way: as simple language structures ensuring that different peoples understand one another sufficiently to turn a mutual profit.
Is it really a pidgin, or is it just a fad? MacIntyre goes on to discuss Chinese pidgin English:
When you take a "look-see", or declare that you "no-can-do" or even enter a "no-go area", you are expressing the remnants of a mercantile language formed by the origins of Anglo-Chinese trade.
I hadn't thought about "no-go area" like that, despite writing an article on them. MacIntyre reminds me of a snippet of information I had heard on Stephen Fry's QI programme:
Among the Koorie people in the Australian Outback, a solar eclipse is Kerosene lamp him b'long Jesus-Christ gone bugger-up altogether.
Me no think so. One person probably said it once. Yu pull leg bilong mipela.
