Dunglish

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!)

This Belgian advert in Flemglish (Flemish + English) has been around for a while, but hey, I didn’t know about it and so it’s time to share.

I think this is a great use of Flemglish (Dunglish) — it can be done!

It even has Dutch subtitles. Yes, Flemish television is often subtitled in Dutch and vice versa whether we like it or not.

Who took my badjas = who took my bathrobe?

Nicely pointed out as spam by the more aware people of the Internet, some Dutch search engine company still dares pollute my inbox after all those laws banning spam were passed.

And since they can’t spell and, according to Google — a real search engine — they are the only ones offering “Full Collor”, I feel no shame in shaming them back. The part I really like is “met een volledige “Full Collor” pagina”, which translates to ‘a full full-colour page’ or if I were still doing this professionally, I would make it ‘a full-page full-colour advertisement’ or something like that.

When I was watching Dutch speed skater Sven Kramer who was basically just waiting to ‘grab dem medals and run’ at the World Speed Skating Championships in Vancouver, Canada last weekend, there were adverts from Dutch utility Essent that read ‘Svencouver’. If you read it in Dutch, the ‘Sven’ rhymes with ‘Van’ because in Dutch the sound is the same. I actually liked it!

Essent wants to get customers to sign up with Essent under the name ‘Svencouver’ so they can get a discount depending on how many gold medals Kramer wins. Problem is, they’re not an official Olympic sponsor. The Dutch Olympic committee asked Essent to lose the good Dunglish because it sounds too much like Vancouver. And that’s apparently not good because Vancouver is supposed to be synonymous with the Olympics, the five coloured rings and all, but not Sven the human bullet.

Luckily for Essent, they also had a back up — ‘Svenergy’, which is now being used. In fact, Essent has no legal obligation to stop using ‘Svencouver’, but are literally being sports about it.

(Link: sportwereld.nl)

I recently participated in a 5 km run for the first time and the folks who organised the event are now free to send me e-mail about upcoming events. This squash event has a funny yet questionable catch phrase, “show us some balls”.

First, this is obviously aimed at the Dutch – fine. No mistakes, great, no actual Dunglish.

However, I find this cheesy in a bad way. I love cheesy, but this is borderline. It could just be me. Sure I chuckled, but as a woman, I don’t like it much in the same way I don’t like e-mails about business events that suggest I should loosen my tie and dress casual. That sort of thing.

I would like to know what you think!