Dunglish

As I am terribly busy, I leave you with some articles about Dunglish:

Foreigners must choose between Dutch and Dunglish

University exaggerates by emphasis on English

The market for these baby products is apparently an international one. Problem is, the name and pun (Diezijn = Design) is pretty much lost on anyone who cannot read Dutch. That’s a lot of people! I’ve seen people get irritated at trying to pronounce “Nijmegen”, a Dutch city, as they couldn’t possibly have known that the ‘i’ and ‘j’ together sound like a ‘y’.

(Photo: Kees)

I found this advert at the beach. Such a stinking rich Dutch beer company knows better than to make this kind of Dunglish mistake. Shame on them!

Is this advert cool or uncool?

Reasons why it’s cool:
- It’s an internationally oriented product for that well-known Philips coffee machine.
- It’s got an English sounding name (the brand is “Zinglez”).
- It doesn’t look particularly Dutch.

Reasons why it’s not cool:
- It says Coffeepower and not coffee power (minor detail).
- It’s currently only available in the Netherlands.
- “Zinglez” reads like a last name in Spanish.

This ‘poffertjes salon’ (Dutch mini-pancake ’salon’) was spotted at a fair (kermis) in Haarlem. The English makes it sound more like a cruise ship. I’ll have mine by the pool, please.

Follow this link for a little bit of Dunglish and a lot of great Dutch mistakes.

(Photo: Slagerij van Kampen (Pool), tip: Martijn)

This clothing store gets more cryptic by the week. As if this earlier posting wasn’t bad enough, we now have ‘divided girls’ on two floors, with ‘divided boys’ getting some space on the ground floor. The big question on my mind is where’s the added value of confusing people?

Since these folks clog (ha, clog, that’s funny) my physical mailbox with unsollicited paper, I get to point out their shortcomings as a ‘potential client’.

This was spotted some time last year at Amsterdam’s flower market. Another fine example of Dutch compromise.

(Photo: Hans)

Although the message gets across, the last bit made me shake my head. Feel free to play spot all the other mistakes as well.