Dunglish

I really like the street wisdom of Loesje that adorns Dutch cities with posters of witty wisdom in Dutch and every now and again in English. However, their English is very often Dunglish, maybe even on purpose, but I have a feeling that they don’t realize their English is wrong. I can imagine this adds to the humour for the Dutch, but I think it’s kind of sloppy and takes away from the joke. Again, love you guys, but you really should get some native help or cut the English out altogether.

“If only a microcredit generated (caused?) a microcrisis”. Even corrected it doesn’t have any punch.

“If only microcredits generated (caused?) microcrises”. That’s just plain ugly.

That’s a lot of mistakes for one wee poster.

Yes, it was all done on purpose, but there are quite a few grains of truth in this Dunglish festival.

Note the sibilance, when the letter ’s’ sounds like a snake in an animation film trying to talk. The cure is to pronounce the ’s’ at the end of a word like a ‘z’. Why they can’t seem to teach that in English classes is beyond me.

The assumption that people can only speak Dunglish is a bit annoying, but hey, then it wouldn’t be funny.

And the advert is full of cheese, windmill and herring clichés as well as the painful reminder that we really can’t live off wind energy. At the risk of sounding very 1970s, I still think nuclear energy is going to make a comeback.

(Thankssss Jarno for the tip!)