Let Ponglish be Ponglisz

I am, no doubt, one of the original speakers and inventors of Ponglish, a new language nestled within Polish, fondly snuffling and nibbling through the rich pickings and wonders of English. As a child, brought up in post war Gdańsk, with an English mother and a Polish father, I had little recourse but to become a successor to the likes of Doktoro Zamenhof and develop this new, and by now, universal language. Both my parents were bi-lingual in Polish and English, but perversely chose to ignore their linguistic skills and addressed each other in their native languages. I chose to stand astride the two (languages) and develop a vocabulary and grammatical structures, which met the needs for communicating in that troubled situation. To my mother’s annoyance, I absolutely refused to ever speak in utter English. It was either Ponglish or Polish.

Even at that time, under Stalin’s strict rule, English was already heavily intruding into Polish. We naturally absorbed and digested łikendy, pikniki, dżentelmeni, futbol, sandwicze, and their like, whereas Polish made no impact on English. So my decision to ladle Ponglish onto a Polish base was sound and, as it turned out in its subsequent development, correct. However, there is a couple of recent deviations in Ponglish, which I did not anticipate, and do not approve of. Polish emigrants to the UK have developed an idiomatic English, based on Polish expressions. Mix that with colloquial Polish carrying a heavy admixture of oddly pronounced English words and you have a language which I might have some difficulty understanding. I can see how this pidgin arose out of a need to be somewhat almost understood by English people, but I find it a troubling and distracting deviation. Give me any day the good old correct, and thankfully more common, Polish grammar with a lathering of adapted English words, plus a discreet twist of borrowed idiom, added for gentle comic effect.

It is going to take heroic and sustained effort to support the continued growth and development of this infant cultural wonder. Whereas Spanglish is well developed, and has the support of well established communities both in the USA and in Latin America, Ponglish is based in the ephemeral new Polish communities in the UK. Still, Polish youth in Poland itself has taken upon itself to surge forth with yet another newly available arena for developing Ponglish: the World Wide Web. Here not only do verbal and grammatical hybrid forms take firm root, but also adaptations in spelling are allowed to thrive. IMHO’s, LOL’s and WTF’s are already adding deeper meaning to internauts pronouncements, ale łał, look at the new vistas this opens up.

Dżizes Krajst! soł tyle tajmzów już było, kiedy Polska snaczowała klęskę z dżozów zwycięstwa. Bieżcie serca, tym razem nie pozwolimy temu slipnąć przez nasze palce. Nie po to emigrowaliśmy do UKa by drinkowac z frendami w hammersmithskis pubach czy flatach na slamzach, i bezmyślnie szopowac na ich hajstritach, i gromadźic hipsy kaszu, i miec sex z ptakami, i placić ich głupie taksy. My po to w tym plejsie by nalernować się properowych kastomzów; no i stworzyć Ponglisz, of kors. Łelkom nowy lók dla fołod lóking Polski. Let Ponglish bi Ponglisz!