English influence on other languages

Hi all

It would be interesting to hear from nonnative speakers of English in particular what influence English exerts on other languages nowadays. What English words and expressions are used in your language? Does English grammar or syntax have an influence on your native language? Where is this influence seen or heard? Books? Journalese? Advertising? Conversation?

Are Anglicisms frowned upon in your language or generally accepted? Of course I welcome replies from native speakers as well, anything you think worth mentioning.

English and Finnish are not related and thus the idea of English grammar exercising an influence on Finnish grammar is all but inconceivable. In advertising, some English expressions are commonly used, for example happy hour is often seen in bars and pubs and some people use it even when they speak Finnish.

Café is the word often seen outside coffee houses or cafeterias, but no one uses the word when they speak Finnish. Finnish is a highly inflected language and café just doesn't lend itself easily to our inflection patterns, which may be the reason people never use the word in conversation.

Some yongsters have adopted the non-Finnish way to read decimals: two point five. I don't mean they say it in English, they just use the Finnish word for point, which is incorrect in Finnish. We don't have a decimal point, we have a decimal comma (2,5). Pocket calculators and computer programmes are probably chiefly to blame for this phenomenon.

There is at least one Finnish Eurosport tennis commentator who uses the English word order when he says thirty all. In Finnish the numeral should come last.

If I realise I have forgotten something important, I'll write another post later. Meanwhile, I'm looking forward to your contributions.
Thank you.

CB

Case Assigner is quite right.
Jobs for example are as longer as possible written in English way. Furthermore scientific words are no longer translated.

online
harddisc
flatscreen
...

Francesca wrote:

For example: the word 'plus' is Latin, so it must be pronounced as 'pl-oo-s', at least in Italy! Most people pronounce it in the English way, because they really think it's an English word or simply that the English pronounciation is better

Hi Francesca

Most interesting! As I am not a spring chicken any more, I don't necessarily have knowledge of all the English words teenagers use, but I assure you I have never hear a Finn say plus in the English way when speaking Finnish. We have the same Latin word  and the Latin pronunciation.

I think one grammatical phenomenon deserves being mentioned here. In Finnish the personal pronouns are always used in a very exact way; in other words, you refers to the person who is being spoken to and cannot be used in a general sense. Sentences like you never know what will happen are incorrect unless you really means the person standing in front of you.

In spoken Finnish, however, especially young people have begun to use you in the English way. This is quite perplexing because there is no need for it. There is an even shorter way to say such things in Finnish: one can use the third person singular form of the verb without a subject. This is not possible in English, but if it were, we would have sentences like this:

Never knows what may happen.
Shouldn't do such things.
If eats too much, puts on weight.

Even though there is no grammatical inadequacy, this English use of the second person singular is spreading like wildfire. English grammar has not altered Finnish grammatical structures, but some youngsters have adopted an inexact English way to use a Finnish personal pronoun.

Some people call it 'the Häkkinen passive' after Formula One driver Mika Häkkinen, who was good at the wheel but languages were not his forte -- not even the Finnish language. Häkkinen is not the originator of this awkward construction, though, he just used it a lot.

Finns realise that Finnish is not under threat and have not resorted to such rather extreme measures as the French. In 1994 a law was passed in France which meant that the use of foreign terms for example in advertising could result in a thousand dollar fine. And a dictionary containing 3,500 French words to replace English words was published in the 1990s.

The French Academy has done a good job of standardising the spelling and defending the French language. The French may sympathise with the purpose of the Academy's efforts but English words are likely to stay in use.

In spanish, you can see the influence of english in a lot of sport terms. Fútbol and basketbol are the spanish equivalents of football and basketball.

There are words in other areas that have been changed very slightly from english, for example the spanish word estandar is an alteration from standard

There are also a series of very commonly used words, like hobby, parking, hippy, .. they're are written in spanish the same way than in english.

Then there are new words that have entered in the last years very strongly in the vocabulary, a very clear example are the words freak and freaky, that are used to design a person who is very strange.