False Pretenses: Don't Engrish Me, I Can't Understand!

While Filipinos are known in Asia as an English-speaking powerhouse, our neighboring South-East and East Asian countries are not that fortunate enough in the mastery and proficiency of speaking the language. History tells us the very reason for this, that many of the Asian countries in the Pacific were never penetrated by any of the English-speaking colonialists and that they also resisted such intrusion. More to that, many of these Asian countries fixated the trade in their coasts thus contact with outsiders was exclusively improbable. Speaking English was also prohibited in these countries, regarding it as an act that is against their nationalistic spirit. But when English evolved as the universal language, these countries encouraged shifted to a more friendly perspective about the language--- giving birth to what they call ENGRISH.


An adorable exemplar of Engrish

According to Wikipedia.org Engrish refers to unusual English originating in East Asian countries. The term itself satirises the frequent habit of Japanese people to confuse the English phonemes "R" with "L", since the Japanese language has one alveolar consonant in place of both. The word is not used in Japan, as the actual Japanese word for the English language is eigo.

While the term may refer to spoken English, it is more often used to describe written English. Engrish can be found in many places, including signs, menus, and advertisements. Terms such as Japanglish, Japlish or Janglish for Japan, Konglish for Korea, Singlish for Singapore, and Chinglish for China are sometimes used as well.

Here is some of the really funny Engrish. (for more amazingly insane images visit engrish.com.)