Poirot Speak: Difference between revisions

They also insert articles before most nouns. If the speaker is German, he will use "ein" (equivalent of "a") liberally, "der" (for "the") less liberally, and "die" or "das" (female and neuter equivalents of "the") rarely. Likewise, Spanish-speaking characters are more likely to use "el" rather than "la", and French-speaking characters almost always use "le". Russians, on the other hand, tend to drop the articles (since Russian has no exact equivalents of "a" or "the".)

 

 

Not to mention that these characters sometimes impose their native tongue's sentence structure on English ("Please to be restful. It is only a few crazies who have from the crazy place outbroken."), [[Malaproper|mix up similar-sounding words]] without realizing it (such as ''dejected'' and ''ejected'', for example), and [[Blunt Metaphors Trauma|generally mangle English idioms]].

See also [[Gratuitous Foreign Language]] and [[As Long As It Sounds Foreign]], wherein nobody's supposed to understand ''any'' of the words. Has some degree of [[Truth in Television]], as slipping into your native tongue is rather common for those who are not completely fluent with a foreign language. However, the way this trope is often used in fiction tends to be the inverse of the way real people talk -- for example, a native English speaker in a Spanish-speaking country will (by necessity) tend to express the ''complicated'' stuff in English, and then (as a courtesy) throw in the handful of Spanish words he actually knows, which will tend to be stuff like "please", "yes", or "thank you": "''Buenos dias, señor. Necessito un nuevo'' compression coil ''para mi'' hovercraft, ''por favor''. ''Si, el'' compression coil. ''Gracias''." It's sort of like saying "I actually bothered to learn some of your language, but unfortunately I can't talk about complicated things yet."

 

 

== Anime & Manga ==

{{quote| ''"For you, Britischer pig, ze var is over."''}}

* Used in ''[[The Da Vinci Code]]'' frequently. The ''second line of dialogue'' after the prologue reads, "Mais monsieur, your guest is an important man." This is representative of most conversations involving non-native English speakers in the book.

* In the novel version of '''[[Two Thousand Ten the Year We Make Contact (Film)|2010]]'' (which portrays rather friendlier Soviet-American relations than the film), the "Russlish" spoken aboard the craft is something of a running joke among the crew of the ''Leonov'', with "STAMP OUT RUSSLISH" posters being mentioned at one point. The American viewpoint character, Heywood Floyd, even mentions speaking to another American (Walter Curnow) in Russian at one point. This is, as noted below, [[Truth in Television]]: mixtures of Russian and English have proven to become remarkably common in space, where Russian cosmonauts and American astronauts frequently spend months together (first aboard ''Mir'', and now on the ISS), although when the book came out (1982) only one US-USSR joint project (1975's Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, which lasted all of 44 hours) had ever been tried.

* in Eric Flint's 163X series (started with the book 1632, written by Flint alone, now includes almost 20 print books, most co-written by Flint and another author(s), many that are anthologies of short stories by many authors, and, of course, the online 'zine "Grantville Gazette", which is formalized, canonized fanfiction), the fictional West Virginian town of Grantville, in the year 2000, is picked up and dropped in the middle of the 30 Years War (in 1631) in the middle of the Germanies. A patois (or pidgin, depending) quickly develops, called "[[Ami Deutsch]]" – "American Deutsch" or "American German". So you have a huge cast of characters who do this so habitually, many readers start doing it in *real life*.

* ''[[Mad TV]]'' has a recurring sketch of well-known American TV shows "dubbed" into Spanish; they use English sentence structure, and words that the average American wouldn't recognize are simply said in English. ("Pero Jack, si Sr. Roper sabe que tu eres heterosexual, él va a evict-te.")

** [[All in The Family|"No soy un meathead!"]]

* [[The League of Gentlemen|Herr Lipp]] manages to mangle virtually every sentence he speaks in such a way that it becomes a [[Double Entendre]]... made especially funny in that you can never quite tell [[Depraved Homosexual|if he's doing it on purpose or not]]. "If you don't understand any of my sayings, come to me in private and I shall take you in my German mouth. Alles klar?"

* Pretty much every character in ''[[Allo Allo (TV)|Allo Allo]]'' and one of the major plot points and sources of humor in the show.

== Theatre ==

* Used in ''[[West Side Story]]''. The Puerto Ricans speak English among themselves, punctuated with "por favor" and "una poca poca?" And "si" is near-ubiquitous.

** That's kind of the joke. As the Docteur sees right through her preposterous disguise, but decides to play along anyway.

* Bill Wyman's single ''Je Suis Un Rock Star''.

* In [http://fromearth.net/LetsPlay/XCOMUFODefense/ this] [[Let's Play]] of ''[[X-COM]]: UFO Defence'', a fan entry in Chapter 3 uses this. "I vaz issued mein waffen today. It is ein stick."

* Zer Germans of ''[[AH Dot Com the Series]]'' use a combination of this an [[Funetik Aksent]]. [[Lampshaded]], as this is said to be a side effect of the Stereotypica Virus that ravaged their world.