“Thanks from the Mountain!”: Humorous Calques in Ponglish as an Output of Language Contact and Language Creativity

Abstract

Since the enlargement of the European Union beginning in 2004, there has been a huge wave of migration to the United Kingdom from Poland. The UK, unlike other EU countries, allowed full access to its labor market to nationals of eight accession countries, including Poland. The diaspora formed new communities and a new contact variety emerged among them, commonly referred to as “Ponglish.” Although Ponglish has enjoyed some attention within linguistics, the humorous, “technically incorrect” literal translations of Polish words and phrases into English, usually by Poles with a rather high proficiency in English, have remained unexamined to date. This article analyzes the phenomenon of literal translations in Ponglish in detail, based on a number of websites dedicated to the subject, and attempts a classification.

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