Wednesday, April 15, 2009

How has English affected other languages ?


We were talking yesterday in class about the 'Spanglish' language that is used here in the USA. Basically 'Spanglish' means using Spanish words as English words or mixing them together. While we were talking about it I noticed that this thing is not going on in the USA only. My classmates from Brazil, Korea and Thailand noticed this in their countries too. They even give names such as "Arabish" that teenagers and younger adults from the Middle East usually use on the internet and sometimes while speaking to each other.

Let's talk about Arabic in Kuwait for example. We know that Kuwait was formed by people from many countries and cultures, and that people learned many accents and languages from other countries that after a while got mixed with the Arabic language, especially words from India and Iran that many people use nowadays in Kuwait, but if we think carefully about it we will notice that English has taken a large part in our language too. We can see that many people nowadays use 'Hi' and 'Bye' instead of 'Alsalam alekum' and 'maa alsalama' not to mention how we name most electronics such as 'mobile' or 'telephone' or lets say the 'brake' in cars. These words came from the English language and are now used instead of the Arabic names of them. People even mix the English words with Arabic letters so that they can make that word a plural, for example, if I wanted to say 'Brakes' I would say 'Braikat' which means the same thing. Another example for saying 'My Mobile' people tend to say 'Mobily' which means the same thing also.

And simply to prove this thing is happening, I'm a Kuwaiti guy who is a part of this blog and I write in English most of the time.

4 comments:

m7ammad | April 15, 2009 5:42 PM
This post has been removed by the author.
Anonymous | April 15, 2009 11:53 PM

and why do you think you are doing this ?? writing in english while english is not your language ???

HowDy | April 18, 2009 11:53 PM

good round-up but i wish you could expand on it... and yes it has become part of our culture especially to people who go to private schools or with foreign parents.

and anonymous isnt it great to speak more than one language? instead of praising the author ur degrading his work?

Anonymous | April 19, 2009 3:50 AM

eeee walla
nice post 3amoor
keep it up(boshhab);)

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