Like for example “libertà” (“freedom” in Italian) would be “libertè” (“freedom” in French) and basically you’d be able to translate entire sentences from Italian to French just like that.

Do you have similar jokes along the lines of “this language is just my language with…”?

38 comments
  1. Dutch is just a drunk Englishman trying to speak German.

    Pretty sure the English also joke that Dutch is just a drunk German trying to speak English.

  2. Back when I was in School and sitting a Welsh language exam a teacher turned around to the class and said “if you forget the word think of the English and add io on the end”

    It use to be a joke you heard more but not so much now

    The thing is it only works for a few words and certainly isn’t something a teacher to be telling students

    acting – actio

    Add – adio

    Claping – clapio

    Click – clicio

  3. Danish is just Swedish spoken with a potato in your mouth. The thicker the Danish the bigger the potato.

  4. Italian is just Spanish with -i/-ini.

    To speak Catalan you just onit the final vowel of words that end with vowel.

    Portuguese is just a funny accent of Spanish

  5. my uncle once said: no problem living in south america, when in trouble just switch to Romagnol XD

  6. We have, especially with people who are close to us linguistically.

    The joke is from a very well-known German satirical magazine, Der Postillon.

    “Dutch people finally admit that their language is just an elaborate joke to make fun of Germans.

    The Hague (dpo) – Many have long suspected it, but now it’s official: the Dutch language was never seriously intended for interpersonal communication. Instead, it is an elaborate joke with which the inhabitants of the area west of North Rhine-Westphalia wanted to poke fun at the Germans. In fact, the Dutch speak perfectly normal German among themselves, as the government in The Hague admitted today.

    As Rutte acknowledged, the Dutch first started making fun of visitors from Germany in the 17th century by feigning their own language based on verbalization of German words. The aim of the action, apart from their own amusement, was that henceforth the Dutch would no longer have to converse with the “Duitsers” (one of the first proven words of the fantasy language), who were regarded as unsympathetic and intrusive.

    “Hello, beautiful lady. I’m Karl-Heinz from Düsseldorf. Nice weather today, isn’t it?” “Ik kan je niet verstaan.”

    https://www.der-postillon.com/2018/05/niederlaendisch.html

  7. Czech language was designed to make Poles laugh. Even when Czech are talking about something very serious, it sounds cutesy/funny for Polish speakers.

  8. Yes we usually say that spanish is french with o at the end of the words. Then we say “Españolo es muy facilo” and It’s shit

  9. This is bit hard to translate to english without some background.

    So we have a province, Varsinais-Suomi. This means more or less die Eigentliches Finland or Finland Proper or Egentliga Finland. REAL Finland.

    Considering what kind of a crapfest the province is, it’s actually a bit hilarious.

    Technically, it can be argued if they’re speaking finnish at all. There’s considerable linguistic evidence to connect them with north estonian dialects (I mean the near dead ones, not the Tallinn-based prestige language) instead of finnish, but we’re the good guys here so we let them make-believe.

    Anyhow, they have that annoying habit of switching the stress on whoever the fuck knows why, when, how or what for, the end resulting like someone was speaking estonian while riding on a horse, but sitting on a sharp rock instead of a saddle.

    However, that’s not the majority perception.

    The majority perception is, they’re a bunch of wankers. Go on, ask anyone. They’ll agree.

  10. In Denmark: Swedish is very drunken Danish, and Norwegian (Bokmål) is just Danish with poor spelling

    In Sweden: Danish is just someone speaking with a hot potato in their mouth

    (We still love you guys)

  11. Waiting for a serbian dude to chip in about slovenes, croatians, bosnians and kosovar. I’m getting my popcorn

  12. Spanish is just adding -es to a Romanian word. Italian is Romanian spoken in a funny way, to add to this last point I find it really funny that Americans consider pastrami Italian food even though it comes from here, and they literally just took out the last letter from pastramă and replaced it with an i

  13. Fun anecdote about Austrian and German German: I once spent a week in Berlin with my then Austrian GF. On the first day we went to a bakery to buy some pastry for breakfast. After we had ordered, paid and left, she asked me, visibly shocked: “what the hell was that? Did I say anything wrong? Why was that lady so mad at me?” I then informed her that everything was all right and that’s just the way people in Berlin speak. To an Austrian, Prussian German simply sounds extremely rude and harsh, as if people were always mad for no reason.

    On the other hand Austrians often struggle to be taken seriously even when they are mad, because to Germans they often sound very cute and funny.

  14. In Flemish, there is something called Jommekesspaans, Jommekes-Spanish, after the Jommeke strip: [https://www.vlaamswoordenboek.be/definities/term/Jommekesspaans](https://www.vlaamswoordenboek.be/definities/term/Jommekesspaans)

    Translation of that site:

    >pseudo-Spanish as it appears in Jommeke comics.
    >
    >It consists essentially of some cliché exclamations (sisi, señora, caramba, etc.), with the attachment of the suffix -os to lexically important words, or sometimes to verbs, omitting the Dutch suffix.
    >
    >We haveos lotsos luckyos, with the flying bollos of professoros Gobelijn to be able to flyos.

    Other examples: “Me Jommekos, do you knowos the wayos to the villagos?”

  15. There’s two in my experience:

    – Spanish is just adding an “-os” suffix to everything.

    – Speaking Dutch but making it sound German is a perfect substitute for actually learning German.

  16. Dutch sounds like German spoken backwards.

    German is a cluster of -en words.

    “How do you say subway in German? Empujenestrujenbajen!” (Pushen-Squeezen-Get-Outen)

    Both Basque and Greek sound like Spanish gibberish. The same happens with Portuguese and Russian, just by phonetical similarity.

  17. Hungarian here, so… no, we’re all alone. 🙁 Finnish and Estonian are not very similar to Hungarian on such a surface level (the relation mostly comes out in the pattern of differences, really).

    That said, Finnish can sound extremely similar to Hungarian if one just listens to the cadence/rhythm. Some years ago I was traveling on a train, with two people sitting in front of me talking just loudly enough so I could hear them with the background noise. And it was driving me crazy, not to understand a word of what they were saying, I kept wondering about what weird dialect they were speaking… until the ticket inspector came, and as they handed him their tickets they mentioned, in English, that they were from Finland. D’oh!

  18. While I can’t think of any specific suffix or anything, the extreme similarity of Czech and Slovak makes many Czechs (including me, occassionally) to believe they can “speak Slovak” just by changing a vowel here and there.

    The results usually range from correct or “more or less correct except *too* Slovakized” to hilariously incorrect.

  19. There are so many of these in different languages that are related.

    The Spanish suffix you mention would be “-dad” which in turn in English corresponds to “-ty” and “-teit” in Dutch so

    Università (IT) > Universidad (ES) > University (EN) > Universiteit (NL)

    Another fun one between Dutch/English (and sometimes German)

    “-oo” = “-ea” in English and “-au” in German. Side note that D in Dutch often turns in to T in both German and English.

    Ex:

    Stoom (NL) > Steam (EN)

    Dood (NL) > Dead (EN)

    Droom (NL) > Dream (EN) > Traum (DE)

    Brood (NL) > Bread (EN)

    Or some where the meaning has warped over time, in this case in English:

    Boom (NL) > Baum (DE) > Beam (EN) in English it means a pole essentially in the other two it means tree, which means the connection is the tree trunk which a sort of beam so to speak. Also the Dutch version is why the part of the sail is called a “boom” in English.

    There’s a metric fuckton of these rules I could ramble on about for translating such a fixed way between the languages I speak – EN, ES, IT, NL, DE

    But yeah then I’d be here all damn day…

  20. We often say that to speak Italian you just add -o and -a at the end of words.

    So it lines up.

  21. Some spaniards jokingly say that catalan is just like spanish but without the -o endings. Catalan marks the masculine with the absence of a vowel, so sometimes it checks out (and lots is a total miss).

  22. Fron a latin american spanish speaker perspektive:

    * “Spanish” spanish: Add “Tio, chaval” and say “vosotros”
    * Italian: Speak with the hands, add “ini” to everithing
    * French: Speak with your tonge, add è, overpronounce “croissant” as much as you can
    * Portuguese: Add “-ção” or “inho”. Use “Você”

  23. If you’re sober, you’re speaking Swedish. If you’re a bit tipsy, you’re speaking Norwegian. If you’re absolutely wasted, you’re speaking Danish. If you’ve full-on passed out and are just making sounds, you’re speaking Finnish.

  24. Danes have a potato stuck in their throats.

    Norwegians are happy and jolly all the time.

    Finnish adds -“lainen” after every word.

    Icelanders are vikings whose language never evolved.

  25. In france we often joke that spanish and italian are just french with an -o or a -a at the end of the words. How ironic

  26. Slang for throwing up is *puhua norjaa*, which means to ‘to speak norwegian’.

    Eg. *Se äijä veti koko illan suoraan pullosta viinaa, ja nyt se on saunan takana puhumassa norjaa*.

    Trans. ‘The dude drank liqour straight out of the bottle all night and he is now behind the sauna, speaking norwegian’.

  27. There was a joke about Croatians, how they are just Catholic Serbians, but then the Serbs took it seriously and ruined the joke in the 90s.

    We don’t joke about anyone being Slovenian, except maybe Slovaks, but that is just coping when others make a mistake , which is fair tbh..

  28. Spanish is just loud, simplified and rapid-fire Portuguese with “cion” and “ue” in every word

  29. It’s not a common saying, but I’ve read this a couple of times:

    “Spanish is Portuguese spoken TO deaf people, and Portuguese is Spanish spoken BY deaf people”.

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