Language Investigation #2

One of the communities that I’ve been a part of for the past two years is that of my Japanese class. There are so few of us that everyone knows everyone. You can frequently find the entire class sitting outside of the Education or eddy buildings before we head into class as a group. Through the two years, we have created a “hybrid language” melding both English and Japanese into what we call “Engrish” to be rather politically incorrect. If we are feeling like being more appropriate, we call our melding or horrible mess-up “Janglish.”

Our Janglish was few and far between in the first year. None of the language created was intentional. I can’t remember many of the words that we came up with out of our attempt to speak such a foreign language with no similar basis. These words are much like in my childhood when I was first learning to speak and I messed up words that my family still uses today. Zerebra instead of zebra sticks just as well as “gomenisau” instead of “gomenasai.” These little mistakes endearingly stick. We came up with ways of remembering phrases that have been adopted outside of the classroom to mean the same thing. The phrase “don’t touch my mustache” is used to remember “douitashimashite,” which means “you’re welcome.” Now “don’t touch my mustache” is a way of saying “you’re welcome.” It’s not quite Janglish, but it only came about because of a mixing of languages.

In the second year, we grew bolder and you could even hear the fine line between appropriate Japanese in class and the Janglish outside of class slipping. Words such as “shimasing” were heard every once in a while to the ire of Becken-sensei, our professor. “Shimasing” is the combination of the Japanese verb, shimasu (pronounced as if the “u” isn’t there) and the English suffix, “-ing.” Nowhere in either language, will you ever find “shimasing.” It means to do. “Have you shimased that yet?” “What are you shimasing?” Another word that we have come up with is “monologimashita.” This was created out of the English word, monologue, and the Japanese word, shimasu. This means to do a monologue in our language. However, it is yet another hybrid and another term that neither English-speaking nor Japanese-speaking people would get. It was born out of a mistake in hearing what we were supposed to do and it stuck. Since we have to practice our speaking a lot, we just call it “monologimashita” whenever we are practicing speaking. A constant question that we use is “doushy” (no, it is not pronounced du-shee, but with a long o sound). This is the shortened version of the word “doushite,” which means why. Whenever we ask “why are you doing that?” or “why did I need to know about what you did when you were drunk,” we insert a “doushy” where the word “why” is. Speaking about times of when you’re drunk, we’ve even come up with a word for that. “Yakesake.” This is the blend between the Japanese word for alcohol, sake and an English mispronunciation. When I was little, I used to pronounce “lots” as in a lot as “yots.” With a little extension of the imagination, it turned into “yakesake.” This means to drink too much alcohol or to get rather ****faced.

Some of us who have grown a little fonder over the two years together have translated the phrase “I heart you” into “Watashi wa kokoro shimasu,” which is the rough translation. It is totally incorrect form and no Japanese speaker would truly understand it. When we say it, they might just roll their eyes with a condescending “Gaijin,” which means outsider. For those of us who aren’t as affectionate use terms such as “hojin.” This is the mixing of the English word “whore” or more so the slang word “ho” and the Japanese counter for person, “jin.” A negative term for somebody we don’t like. “That girl is such a hojin.”