Finglish

The term Finglish was introduced by professor Martti Nisonen in the 1920s in Hancock, Michigan, to describe a linguistic phenomenon he encountered in America. As the term describes, Finglish is a macaronic mixture of the English and Finnish languages. In Finglish, the English lexical items are nativized and inserted into the framework of Finnish morphology and syntax. The Finnish immigrants to the United States and Canada are one group that speak Finglish, but Finglish is also found in any place in Finland, where international contacts and popular culture exists, including Finnish language learners.

Finglish originated amongst the first and second generation Finnish immigrants in US and Canada. Since few of them had any higher education or language skills, many of them ended up in menial and industrial jobs, where they learned English through practice. The language skills of the first generation American Finns remained always limited; second and third-generation American Finns usually were more or less bilingual. Finglish emerged as a pidgin with something they already knew (Finnish) and something they were bound to learn (English).

Most of the Finnish immigrants were from the provinces of Savonia, Tavastia and Ostrobothnia, and the grammar also reflected those dialects.

The most common characteristic of historical Finglish were (in descending order of frequency):

Words used in US Finglish often have completely different meanings in Finnish, especially when the Finglish terms are borrowings from English; they have become expressive loans: ruuma (from and meaning 'room'; in Finnish meaning 'cargo hold'"), piiri ('beer'; 'district'), leijata ('to play'; 'to hover'), reisi ('crazy'; 'thigh'), and touvi ('stove'; 'halyard'). US Finglish compound words can produce combinations completely incomprehensible to native Finnish speakers, like piirikäki ('beer keg'; 'district cuckoo') or the somewhat less incomprehensible ilmapiika ('flight attendant'; 'air maid').

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Wikipedia