Friday, 9 October 2009

Dangerous English

Helsingin Sanomat's English-language edition has been running a series on "Tankero-English" and its use by Finnish politicians down the years. Examples of Tankero:

"Kän piipöl ket laisens tu ö händ kan sou frii laik it häs biin juusd in Finland."

"Sou aim veri kritikal foor tis gan, tiis händkans.”

Anu Nousiainen asks:
If English is today to be understood as a motley collection of "Englishes", then is it not a bit over the top to demand that Finnish politicians should have the sort of language skills a native speaker is blessed with by accident of birth?

1 comment:

Tobias Ljungvall said...

I was once told that the world's most common language is not English but bad English. And sometimes it seems to me that non-native English speakers are better equipped to understand it.