Dunglish

Just to recap, Denglish is German (Deutsch) mashed together with English, and since Austrians speak German (love the way it sings), they too can produce their own variety of Dunglish. In fact, the village I stay in had lots of Dutch signs with German endings, but we eventually understood what they meant. Something to do with skis.

I wouldn’t normally make a big deal out of such a typo, but since this was on the menu half way down the ski slope, I couldn’t leave it alone. The food was very good (I ordered the goulash). And nobody needs spare rips when booming down the piste.

Did someone bring their German spy decoder? Every non Anglo-Saxon nation makes different mistakes in English and this was thoroughly made by a German. A Dutchman spotted it, wanting to share and show that maybe Dunglish isn’t all that bad sometimes. This photo is a thing of beauty.

It’s also odd that being in the Netherlands, the expectations of speaking English seems to be higher than what my friends tell me about Germany. If the German who wrote this writes this way to their clients, well, I can’t imagine it actually amounting to anything. They do get points for not capitalizing any nouns, as they do in German.

(Photo: Eric)

Interestingly enough, this Denglish habit is also a Dunglish one: splitting words in two to save space (time, being lazy, all kinds of reasons). The problem of course is that the author followed the rules of German instead of English. Both ‘Sunday’ and ‘holiday’ should be plural (there’s more than one in a year) and holiday is capitalised, again following German rules. That’s a lot of mistakes in five words. You could also debate that it should read ‘national holidays’, ‘public holidays’, ‘bank holidays’, someone stop me.

When in doubt, write it out or ask, just like for directions, it won’t hurt.

For anyone who wants to know why I was in Germany (shameless self-promotion), click here.