Non-English Speakers Are Sharing English Words They Use In Their Languages (46 Answers)

English is one of the most popular languages in the world. About 2 billion people speak it but to find out just how deeply it has really made its way into cultures around the world, Reddit user everythingtiddiesboi made a post on the platform, asking "Non-English speakers of Reddit; the way Americans use foreign words such as Bon Appétit and Sayonara in regular conversation, what English words do you use?"

And their call was answered. People immediately took to the comment section, sharing the okays and randoms they hear in their countries, providing interesting insights into our collective linguistic landscape.

#1

Norwegians use 'Texas' as an adjective in describing parties, as in, 'That party was Texas!' In this context it means both 'huge and epic' and 'probably embarrassing for everybody involved.

#2

In France, a lot of "Ouat Ze Feuk" (wtf)

#3

In German, the list is as long as the day is... also long? F***, sorry, f*** you, hello, good morning, b****, bye, what's sup?, and cheers just to name a few. Also, a lot of people just kinda swap in the direct English translations for words to sound young and trendy. Nouns like pants, bag, backpack, bike, ect are popular as well as germanized verbs like "collecten", "up-picken", "texten", ect.

#4

In Poland we often use "sory" (pronounced a bit differently than sorry) instead of przepraszam, guess why.

#5

Sorry,' 'ok,' and 'cool' are the most common ones in Czech. Even my grandma uses those.

#6

Hindi and Marathi: we use tons of English words in daily language. There are many things for which only the English word is in use, because the vernacular word either is outdated or doesn’t exist. Simple examples: “table”, “light/bulb”, any computer related noun: speaker, keyboard, etc. Many English verbs are also freely and very commonly adapted into Hindi sentences, eg. “Maine usko help kiya” (I helped him) would be considered a valid Hinglish sentence.

#7

American but I know Japanese people say "bye-bye" and "okay"

#8

Dutch speaking person here. We have loads of loanwords from English. Even verbs. The interesting part is that the Dutch conjugation rules still apply for verbs loaned from English.

"I deleted" becomes "Ik deletete"

"I've gamed all day" becomes "Ik heb de hele dag gegamed"

Not a verb but "The backed-up data" becomes "De geback-upte gegevens"

#9

The French say: le selfie le feedback le brunch There’s more but that’s all I can think of just now

#10

Talking with a portuguese man the other day, apparently they call bowling by its English name. There is a word for it in portuguese, Boliche, But he had never heard it before

#11

I'm Croatian and the English words that we use a lot are 'random,' 'accidentally,' and 'officially

#12

Im korea there are a few english words used but they rarely have the same exact meaning. For example, “panty” is used to mean underwear but it is a gender neutral term (essentially what underwear is in english). There are some words are that are used as slang like “some”. A “some” relationship is essentially when two people are interested in each other but haven’t had the girlfriend/boyfriend talk yet.

#13

There's no real word for yes or no in Irish.

Some use "ta" or "sea" (those are missing fadas) but those translate closer to "it is"

So if you go to a Gaeltacht area you will hear native Irish speakers chatting in Irish to one another but saying "ya" or "yes" every few seconds because it's a useful word and how the hell did we not have a work for it for so long

#14

We say “Make sense” a lot in Sweden, but modified to be more Swedish. We say it more like “make:a sense”, which basically substitutes a “to” before “make” by adding the “a” at the end. Pronounced “Make ah sense”.

#15

Alota Russian: f***, sorry, hi, bye, ROFL, lol, ok, prank, flex, what's up, s***, b****, guy, okurrrr, oh my god

#16

In Finnish, we use "high five" pretty regularly, as well as"fine", in the sense of something being acceptable; "Se olis mulle ihan fine" = "It would be fine with me". WTF is also common, with the letters pronounced in the Finnish way.

#17

Iranian here. Lot of curse words, like f***, b****, goddammit, etc.

#18

Filipino here. Everyone calls you ma'am/sir

#19

There are lots of English words used in Italian, sometimes idiosyncratically: 'public relations,' 'flash' (for USB drive), 'feeling' (for romantic chemistry)

#20

A lot of curse words, obviously. I also use slang that I would never use in an English conversation like saying lol(it got obsolete and uncool very fast in English but stuck with me and many memesters including me and my friends in Russia).

#21

Brazilian Portuguese:

The word "site " as in website.

Ok.

Delete (with Portuguese conjugation)

Monetize (also with portuguese conjugation)

Flaps (of airplanes)

We call flashdrives exclusively as pendrives.

Notebook/Laptop

Do tennis and jeans count?

#22

I'm a french speaker and here in switzerland I hear a lot of english words as well!

• cringe • awkward • sorry • bye • cool • fast food/junk food • design • game art/digital art, speed paint • cute • creepy

And a lot of other! In fact a lot of young people use to use english sentences for being cool!

#23

In my line of work as a programmer the average Dutch sentence is 35% English vocabulary and when I speak with friends it's 20%.

I do just really use interjections like "though", "I guess", "like", "I mean" in my normal Dutch together with a lot of nouns and verbs that have a perfectly cromulent Dutch alternative—this is not that odd for Dutch speakers.

Like I would absolutely just say something like this in "Dutch": "Yeah, ik ben nu bij den final stages dier page; ik moet nog even de shadows afwerken en wat eye detail voltooien en dan is het wel done, I guess.".

#24

When I asked how to say "I feel you" in German. My German friend said "I feel you". I think in German they use a lot of phrases which actually sound bad. I haven't heard young people saying "scheisse" they all use "s***".

#25

Visiting a girlfriend in Spain, her friends loved saying "Kill It" when finishing a drink.

To them it was the funniest way to take shots.

#26

One English word recently adopted by Russian is "fake". It's used as a noun, not an adjective (e.g. "this story turned out to be a fake"). Another word increasingly used by Russians online is "hater".

#27

Many swear words: F***, S***, Oh my god, Shut up, Come on, B****, Motherf***** and F*** off are common. We also use stuff like: nice, cool, gay, straight up, trash, stuff, dope, cops etc. the list is way too long. But I don't like to use English words and «Germanize» them. I find that cringy.

#28

In Denmark they use lots of English words, but the most common by far are 's**'* and 'f***.'

#29

I'm Dutch and a translator and man, so many English words have been integrated into Dutch that it is hard to tell sometimes where one language ends and the other begins. Especially in corporate speak on the management level, it's basically 90% English.

De business case over de accountability van de return on investment was een sterke driver van year over year groei van de service provider.

Just threw some words together that might not make absolute sense, it's more of an illustration to show how much English I deal with in what is supposed to be an English text.

#30

In Polish 'no hey' can be used to say hello and also goodbye

#31

Well, I live in Greece and we use A LOT of English words. But, the weirdest thing I've noticed (especially from teenagers) is to go to a tourist area, mostly beaches, and try to act like tourists. So, we are just walking on the streets having a high-level conventions in our fake-a$$-British-accents.

-No Mr. Stathakopoulos I'm British. Please repsect my accent

#32

Estonian here! I just say the foreign word(s) or just "You too!" or something. Probably most boring answer here but it's fine.

#33

In Denmark we say “f******” as an exaggeration for just about everything. “Det var f****** sjovt!” would be the equivalent to “it was so fun!”

#34

In France, we use the word "weekend". We literally don't have a French word for it. So we just use the English one.

#35

Pakistani here, pretty much every other sentence in Urdu spoken by people that live in urban areas has at least some English in it. Sometimes whole sentences, sometimes just a swear word. Mainly because of two reasons: we (along with India and Bangladesh) used to be a British colony until 1947, and also American media influence is pretty much everywhere.

Fridge, light, table, phone, internet, pistol, shirt, pants, shorts (we use the British "knickers"), school, college, backpack (bag), camera, movie etc. This list could pretty much go on for paragraphs.

#36

Balkan-Slav here. I often use “heyo” as a greeting.

#37

Colombian here. Educated, usually bilingual people use tons. Okay in daily conversations, what, why, please, fine, wtf, thanks, beautiful, nice, yummy, bye, great, whatever. And then full on expressions such as "You know what I mean," "That's what she said," "I don't get it," etc., mainly copied from popular culture through movies and TV shows.

#38

In Germany, we often say "What ze fack?" (How it sounds)

#39

In Argentina a one night stand is a "touch and go"

#40

I work in science, and have several colleagues from the Middle East, East Asia etc. When they talk to their own collaborators at home in their native language, it's amazing how much English scientific terminology is present in other languages.

#41

Saying ok is very common in Spanish speaking countries (at least in South America). I used to say it all the time, but now I prefer saying vale, vale - which is the European Spanish version of ok.

#42

Brazilian Portuguese:

•Words related to technology (download, uplink, streaming, chat)

•Web slangs (WTF, OMG, LOL)

•Business and psychology (mindset, brainstorm, coach, goal)

#43

Italian here, we (mis)use A LOT: from cocktail to smartphone, freezer, shampoo, jobs act (kill me!!), exit poll, welfare, startup, manager, full time, freelance, CEO (no one knows what it stands for), target, brand, makeup, outfit, playback, live, teenager, ...

#44

"Creepy"
In spanish, the equivalent/traduction sound super cringy

#45

Brain freeze. There is no literal translation into German for this word yet perfectly describes my behavior every time I eat ice cream.

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For Our Mom’s 70th Birthday, My Brother And I Recreated Our Weird And Funny Photos From Childhood

COVID-19 has everyone locked down and sad. My mom turned 70 this past July and before the virus came along, we had a plan to go on a big family trip together to celebrate her. Obviously, that was not to be, so my brother and I decided to honor her in the only way we knew how—with ourselves.

Our mom was the kind of mom who would take us to Sears for a formal portrait every year. She would probably still do this if we all lived in the same place. Many of you may recognize some of the background settings of the more studio-like of the portraits: fake Xmas tree, weird beige “blanket,” and, my personal favorite, floating baby head.

My brother and I had an excellent time recreating these photos, and we hope they will bring a smile to someone’s face.

Newborn sister vs. maybe dead sister

Floating baby head

This baby pool feels smaller

Burnt orange rug

Whatever are you doing in the background?

If you give a toddler a cookie

It’s weirder to sit on my brother’s lap when we are both over 40

Sears 4 life

But, really, we haven’t aged a bit

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Mandy Barker on documenting an ocean of plastic

Through her beautiful images of manmade waste, photographer Mandy Barker has highlighted the ugly truth about plastic pollution. Rachael Steven talks to her about her creative process

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A call for a radical reimagining of life to combat the climate crisis

Tackling the climate crisis will take imagination and grit, attributes that creatives and designers have in abundance. Here, Pentagram and Do The Green Thing’s Ashley Johnson, Katee Hui and Naresh Ramchandani explain why creatives should be central to leading the change the world needs

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The work of Genie Kausto is pumped full of camp fantasy

Genie Kausto is a creative duo made up of hair artist Evanie Frausto and photographer George Kan. The New York-based pair initially met when Frausto cut Kan’s hair. “We started doing photos together almost a year after that,” says Frausto. “It just seemed to work. We both had very different perspectives but they seemed to come together.”

The alias of Genie Kausto not only adds an air of mystery, it also allows the pair to be credited jointly for the work. “This world we’re in is so eager to divide it up, saying who did this and who did that. But it’s never really like that – in any project,” explains Kan. “The credits being accurate to the division of work or labour or ideas is a lie everyone just seems to live with. It’s weird. Working together we really felt that, and coming up with the name Genie Kausto was part of the solution to that problem.”  

Though their styles seemingly clash, the pair manage to fuse elements of their separate tastes into one free-spirited aesthetic. For hair artist Frausto, his penchant for big silhouettes and synthetic wigs includes references to fashion history and nods to 90s supermodels, Vogue covers from the 60s, and old hair ads from the 40s. In contrast with Kan’s background studying art history and performance, he embraces the weird, the wonderful, and the theatrical, all the while making sure a loose narrative is woven throughout his images. This mish-mash of approaches comes together to create imagery that’s beautifully camp and comical, plus “a little gross”. “That’s important,” says Frausto.

Tan

Though they still work on individual projects, as Genie Kausto the pair have worked on bodies of work for Vice, Paper Magazine, Office Magazine and many more. Much of their recent output has been quarantine inspired, and as the duo are also a real life married couple as well, it’s allowed them the opportunity to push their ideas within the constraints of a pandemic.

The series for Office Magazine for instance, Couples Retreat, involves the pair adopting various nostalgic, romantic identities for a series of oddball self-portraits. Elsewhere, the series Inside and Occupied for Paper sees them tapping into the things once thought of as just hobbies, which have now become obsessions during lockdown, such as cycling, knitting and gaming. 

Bob

The element of fantasy in Genie Kausto’s work is what sets their editorial work apart, and this sense of escapism is heavily linked to both Frausto and Kan’s upbringings. “I grew up in a very conservative neighbourhood,” says Frausto. “A Mexican-American community, and I was a scene kid, with giant hair, who’d made his own skinny jeans. So I really stood out. But that was the point. It was about trying to imagine a totally different way of looking.”

“I was theatre obsessed. Everything was a show,” adds Kan. “The whole time. The whole fantasy thing, really, I think it’s a queer thing. Both of us as kids really gravitated to the feminine toys, the feminine clothes, stuff that was never really granted to us – but we stole it for ourselves.” For both the photographer and hair artist, their work is about escaping reality, being different and being bold enough to imagine something else, something bigger.

Hillbilly

While the couple’s work is centred around escapism, living and creating together means switching off from the actual making of work can sometimes be difficult for Kan and Frausto. “It’s hard to know where the line is between the work and everything else,” says Frausto. “We’ll end up at three in the morning arguing over a prosthetic, or the positioning of something. And it’s getting later and one of us is cranky and we’re still stuck in the costume and we can’t take the make-up off and we just bicker.”

“We do everything on the smallest budget, so finally buying things like a tripod, eases a lot of the stress,” adds Kan. But their love for what they do keeps them excited and eager to push it. “It’s a form of expression. An outlet. It’s a chance to get really weird,” say Frausto. “In fashion there are so many filters, so many rules to follow. So it’s nice to go balls to the wall and let it all hang out.” 

Though Genie Kausto has yet to work on any commercial jobs, with the editorial work they’ve created, they’ve made their vision and aesthetic clear, and nothing will be compromised. “It’s really the same as the rest of the work we do. We’re just doing whatever we’re doing, and really, that’s when we do it best.”

Smiley Face

Frausto and Kan are keen to be part of an environment that’s open to change and progress. “There are a lot of changes in fashion that are really important and are just starting to happen,” says Frausto. “We’re seeing different kinds of people – both in front and behind the camera. I just hope that these kinds of changes are not just a trend.” 

“I agree, but that is really just the more forward-thinking part of the fashion world,” adds Kan. “To see any of those changes really be part of the mainstream will be another thing. But beyond that, part of the problem with the ‘creative industries’ is inherent to them being ‘industries’. It’s all capitalism and exploitation and nasty thoughts made normal. But we try not to get stuck on that.” 

“Yeah. That’s where the ‘fantasy’ comes in,” says Frausto. 

@genie.kausto

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Documenting London’s street signs through the ages

London Street Signs offers a look at the various nameplates attached to buildings around the city, ranging from robust, cast-iron plates to ornate signage.

The book gathers photographs taken by Alistair Hall, art director, UAL lecturer and founder of Ministry of Stories, a charity based in east London that helps children to learn the art of creative writing.

Hall began taking photographs of nameplates in 2016, taking over 4,000 images in that time. As with most books that document a collection of any given object or material through the ages, London Street Signs is as much about tracing history as it is about the signage itself.

The street signs serve as “temporal anchors”, giving both a visual and written overview of typographic developments, changes in design, the availability of new materials and even the history of the area itself. Included in the book are signs featuring the now defunct London postcode area N.E., which stopped being used in London over 150 years ago and now represents the Newcastle region in the UK.

London Street Signs by Alistair Hall is published by Batsford on September 3; pavilionbooks.com/imprints/batsford

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Five designs with a sense of humour by EJR Barnes

Self-taught designer EJR Barnes makes furniture and lighting pieces with "a wry smile". We've rounded up five of his surrealist projects, including a club chair wrapped in Venetian blinds and a table lamp with a candle instead of a bulb.

With a background in sculpture and poetry, London-based Barnes aims to turn "floaty ideas" into functional pieces that question the purpose of the original objects.

"The main thing for me is that there is always a bit of a wry smile happening, without it looking like the whole thing is a joke," he told Dezeen.

"To be making things like this, you've got to have a sense of humour. Because if you take yourself too seriously when you're making arty furniture, then who really are you?"

A different business model for design

Barnes is one of a new generation of designers, which has been enabled by the internet to eschew traditional design education and retail systems.

He learned how to make furniture through YouTube videos, initially working from the backroom of his day job, and now sells his pieces largely with the help of Instagram.

"I've met some incredible clients who are interested in working with me because they've followed what I've been doing for a while," said the designer.

"Using Instagram as a tool means that I can have this very lean business model where it's just me in a studio and a couple of fabricators making things according to demand."

Here, Barnes picks out five pieces that exemplify his approach:

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Desk with Four Vessels

Barnes frequently designs hybrid objects with two or more uses in mind.

This desk, for example, features four cylindrical vessels embedded into its steel base. The client, a curator and magazine editor living in east London, is now using these to grow small orange trees.

"We got really into this idea of having a vista under your work," said Barnes.

"So when you look through the window at the garden you see foliage behind glass, and then if you look down through the desk you see foliage behind glass. It creates this dual meaning for the object, which serves as a place for work but also does something else for you."

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A Wild Sheep Chaise; Dolphin Hotel Club Chair

Venetian blinds wrap around this cuboid chair, encased in cork window frames.

Hidden behind these is a series of strip lights, which emit an ominous glow when illuminated.

"There's something about Venetian blinds, the patterns and the rhythm of the slats, that I really like," Barnes explained. "You could see them in the background of a film noir, with dusty light filtering through these stayed window coverings."

"I wanted to use this feeling I got from the blinds in something that wasn't a window," he added. "By using them to block out a chair it almost creates this idea that there might be something behind them."

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Junior Downhill Anvil

This low side table is made out of plywood and other readily available materials, which Barnes gave the vibrant, polished finish of a vehicle.

The final result resembles a "spaceship sledge" and forms part of a larger, but largely unpublished, portion of his work that is all about sledges.

"I got really interested in people displaying automobilia and historic motorbikes in their homes. And I wanted to create fake examples of this, like fictional objects for movement," he said.

"They never have engines or anything that's too obviously about cars; it's more within the sculptural form. If you look at people like [Romanian artist Constantin] Brâncuși, he did these beautiful carvings, which have a slickness to them that resembles race cars but is simultaneously very primitive."

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Bavette, The Glacier, A Silver Room

Since Barnes got his own studio a year ago, he has built or assembled all of his pieces himself, eliminating the need for a finalised render to send to fabricators and allowing him to take a more iterative approach.

This coffee table started from the simple idea of using a kidney-shaped tabletop, cut from a slice of red travertine that resembles the marbling of a steak.

"The process was almost like assembling a collage," he said. "As soon as I had the idea in my head that the tabletop was a slab of meat, the client and I went on the hunt for the kinds of objects that could prop it up."

"It was more like creating a piece of art than a design. You can make a mark, decide it's wrong and change the whole thing or make another mark and take another step and go in a different direction with it."

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Analogue Table Lamp No.1

This candle holder is one of several metalwork pieces created by the designer during the coronavirus lockdown, while he taught himself how to weld.

The design is Barnes' take on the classic Armani Casa lighting range, which features "variations of a pyramid on a stick". Here, this motive is rendered entirely in metal and with a candle instead of a lightbulb. 

"It's a bit of a joke, really. An analogue table lamp is like the ouroboros of design eating its own tail because we invented electricity to get rid of candles but people want the look of both, no matter if it's not functional," said the designer.

"I want to be playful with form but without sacrificing subtlety. A lot of people, when they say they prioritise form over function, create these crazy, pink, fluffy wherever. Whereas I still want things to be quite reserved."

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