"Janglish" news report

[Beverly Flanigan]

I've never heard "Janglish" as a term for Japanese-English code mixing, nor
has my Japanese colleague.  "Japlish" has been used, although, like
Spanglish and Singlish, it may or may not be acceptable to users.  But the
naivete of the article is amazing, since English borrowings are common in
Japanese.  New borrowings are obviously incomprehensible to some, just as
teenage slang is, but they quickly become familiar.  My colleague said
"mireniamu" (with silent final 'u' conventionally) is very common, and he
even recognized my broken pronunciation of it.  I suspect it's the usual
diatribe against teen talk.

At 04:09 PM 1/17/00 -0500, you wrote:
>'Janglish' is simply just jangle for many
>
>Date: 17/01/2000
>
>By JULIET HINDELL in Tokyo
>
>Half of all Japanese adults say they cannot understand what young people say,
>partly because of a flood of new English and other foreign words entering
>everyday conversation.
>
>A survey by the Yomiuri newspaper found that 81 per cent of people were
>confused by words borrowed from English. More than half said they had trouble
>understanding Japanese because new words entered the language so quickly, and
>48 per cent said they found the way that young people spoke was impenetrable.
>
>Mireniamu and ribenji (millennium and revenge) were just two of the words
>that have crept into Japanese from English which people have difficulty
>understanding. Only half the respondents knew what they meant. Many
>complained that young people used so many foreign words that they might as
>well be speaking another language.
>
>(story continues:  http://www.smh.com.au:80/news/0001/17/text/world8.html
>
>- Allan Metcalf