Vinish
From Academic Kids
Vinish or Vietnamese English is a mixed language of Vietnamese and English, often found in immigrant communities in majority-English-speaking countries. Some Vinish words, with English translation and comments in parentheses:
- cà rem
- Popsicle; used widely in Vietnam
- ga
- natural gas
- hon đa
- motorbike, from the Japanese automaker Honda, who is wildy popular; used widely in Vietnam
- ra-đi-ô
- radio; used more often than truyền thanh
- ti vi
- TV; used more often than truyền hinh in Vietnam
- phôn
- telephone; used interchangeably with điện thoại; also số phôn instead of số điện thoại to mean telephone number
- á-lô
- hello; used when answering the telephone, so that it sounds like "hello" to an English-speaker
Most of these words are simply words from English, recasted into the Vietnamese alphabet phonetically. This "language" is comparable to Spanglish, in which speakers may mix whole phrases of a second language into their speech.
