(Sometimes undesirable) commingling of English and Finnish (from either direction). Particularly experienced by Finnish-speaking students of English language, and Finnish people born in an English-speaking country.
The term was coined by prof. Martti Nisonen at Suomi College in Hancock, Michigan in late 1920s to describe the introduction of English words to Finnish spoken by the local Finnish immigrants.
Some major branches:
- Otherwise normal English that uses some of the Finnish sentence structure or phrases. (This is just wrong. The other types of finglish may be understandable, but this is just bad language =)
"turn on the TV", not "open the TV"!
- Finnish that loans heavily words from English. This is the original usage of the word finglish. "Out-Finlanders" sometimes use this sort of thing, but it often creeps into jargons too - particularly the local computer jargon.
"Pussaa se peipiboki kitsistä petiruumaan!" = "Push the baby buggy from the kitchen to the bedroom!"
"Mä forkkaan kovalevyä." = "I'm formatting the hard disk." (Note: This expression is also heard as "forkkaan kovoa", but this is incorrect - "kovo" (from "kova", "hard") is "hardware", not "hard drive". Oh, how easily this new generation forgets...)
- Forgotten computer slang meaning: What happens when a computer program for English locale being used in Finnish locale.
"Connection timed out. Retry? (Kyllä/Ei)"
(Forgotten... perharps because Petteri Järvinen mentioned it in some book. That's why everyone thought the term wasn't cool anymore. =)
Some facts and the middle example from the web page: http://www.uta.fi/FAST/US1/P1/finglish.html