A comprehensive survey of over 500 words such as Chinglish, Hinglish, Japlish, Taglish, etc.

What is it about?

This article looks at "lishes" (portmanteau terms based on the word "English") used to describe hybrids of the English language with other languages (e.g. Chinglish, Hinglish, etc.). A citation database of over 3500 entries was created containing 510 separate terms dating from the early twentieth century to mid-2016. The results show a trend of continuing increase in the coining of such terms. The article examines these in terms of semantics, etymology, history, frequency, and pronunciation, and presents an alphabetical listing of the complete set in its appendix.

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Why is it important?

Despite the growing academic interest in World Englishes, to date there has been no exhaustive examination of names for such English-language hybrids of which the present research uncovered more than 500 (previous accounts generally list between 20 and 70 terms). Importantly, the paper takes a linguistic perspective examining these words in terms of meaning, origins and word-formation processes, frequency of occurrence, and pronunciation. Uniquely it attempts to find the earliest example of each term (some of which surprisingly date back to the 1930s), and in doing so found 5 antedatings of the earliest attestations in the "Oxford English Dictionary" (which, by the by, only covers 7 'lishes' in total). The appendix includes all 510 terms discovered together with their meanings, number of citations, and range of dates (from earliest known occurrence to latest).

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