Czenglish, a
portmanteau
A portmanteau word, or portmanteau (, ) is a blend of words[interlanguage
An interlanguage is an idiolect that has been developed by a learner of a second language (L2) which preserves some features of their first language (L1), and can also overgeneralize some L2 writing and speaking rules. These two characteristic ...](_blank)
of
English
English usually refers to:
* English language
* English people
English may also refer to:
Peoples, culture, and language
* ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England
** English national ...
heavily influenced by
Czech
Czech may refer to:
* Anything from or related to the Czech Republic, a country in Europe
** Czech language
** Czechs, the people of the area
** Czech culture
** Czech cuisine
* One of three mythical brothers, Lech, Czech, and Rus'
Places
* Czech, ...
pronunciation
Pronunciation is the way in which a word or a language is spoken. This may refer to generally agreed-upon sequences of sounds used in speaking a given word or language in a specific dialect ("correct pronunciation") or simply the way a particular ...
,
vocabulary
A vocabulary is a set of familiar words within a person's language. A vocabulary, usually developed with age, serves as a useful and fundamental tool for communication and acquiring knowledge. Acquiring an extensive vocabulary is one of the ...
,
grammar
In linguistics, the grammar of a natural language is its set of structural constraints on speakers' or writers' composition of clauses, phrases, and words. The term can also refer to the study of such constraints, a field that includes doma ...
or
syntax
In linguistics, syntax () is the study of how words and morphemes combine to form larger units such as phrases and sentences. Central concerns of syntax include word order, grammatical relations, hierarchical sentence structure ( constituenc ...
spoken by learners of
English as a second language
English as a second or foreign language is the use of English by speakers with different native languages. Language education for people learning English may be known as English as a second language (ESL), English as a foreign language (EFL ...
. The term ''Czenglish'' is first recorded in 1989, with the slightly earlier variant ''Czechlish'' recorded from 1982.
Characteristics
Examples include confusing verbatim translations (such as "basic school" for ', which should be "primary school" or "elementary school"), incorrect
word order
In linguistics, word order (also known as linear order) is the order of the syntactic constituents of a language. Word order typology studies it from a cross-linguistic perspective, and examines how different languages employ different orders. C ...
in a sentence and use of inappropriate
preposition
Prepositions and postpositions, together called adpositions (or broadly, in traditional grammar, simply prepositions), are a class of words used to express spatial or temporal relations (''in'', ''under'', ''towards'', ''before'') or mark various ...
s and
conjunctions because of the influence of their Czech equivalents.
Another typical aspect is the absence of definite articles (due to the lack of articles in Czech) and the use of "some" in place of an indefinite article. In Czenglish and other Central European accents is often pronounced as , or ; as , and as an
alveolar trill
The voiced alveolar trill is a type of consonantal sound used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents dental, alveolar, and postalveolar trills is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is ...
as in some Scottish accents, rather than the more standard
approximant
Approximants are speech sounds that involve the articulators approaching each other but not narrowly enough nor with enough articulatory precision to create turbulent airflow. Therefore, approximants fall between fricatives, which do produce ...
.
Voiced consonants at the end of words like "big" are pronounced unvoiced (); "ng" is understood as a /ng/ sequence and therefore follows the final devoicing rule (e.g. to sing merges with to sink ).
Reception
Most elements of Czenglish only cause little confusion and are eventually understood by a native speaker. Some, however, may lead to embarrassing situations, since to a native English speaker they seem to be correct English sentences, although the Czech speaker meant to say something different. Such misunderstanding may be recognized only by considering the appropriateness of each of the possible meanings in the given context. Czechs in general tend to be openly hostile to one another's grammar mistakes, both in English and Czech.
See also
*
Bohemisms
References
Further reading
*
External links
Common ''Czenglish'' mistakes(based on Sparling's book)
{{interlanguage varieties
Macaronic forms of English
Czech language