Engelands

Engelands is an unofficial Dutch word to refer to a mixture of English and Dutch (Engels en Nederlands).

This used to be no problem at all. People who knew their audience would understand what they meant blended English words into Dutch sentences. Only in bidirectional communication, mind you.

Sentences like "Je moet je file saven" ("You must save your file") are common. And there is not much wrong with that, were it not for the fact that "saven" is now an official Dutch word, and hence acceptable in unidirectional communication.

It used to be so that these sentences were completely random, conforming to no apparant grammatical rules or any form of structure whatsoever. If it was ambiguous, or vague, clarification could be requested directly.

But now the nice people at the invent-a-stupid-rule^TM company are trying to apply common Dutch grammatical structures to the assimilation of English words into the Dutch language.

An example:

A normal, regular, Dutch verb:
Ik maak
Hij maakt
Hij maakte
Hij heeft gemaakt

Anyone can see that there is some regularity in there.

Now for the new verb "quote":
Ik quote
Hij quotet (This could be without the 't'. That's anyone's guess, really)
Hij quootte
Hij heeft gequoot

Now, if the above makes any sense, I should have myself committed to a mental institution. The verb "to save" is even worse in dutch. The second one on the list would be "Hij safet", whilst the others keep the original 'v'.

The worst part is that there are perfectly acceptable substitutes for all of the aforementioned words.

Another, completely different, problem of Engelands is the assimilation of English words into the Dutch language by adding a meaning to an already existing word. This adds a lot of superfluous ambiguity to our already extremely complex language.

The most common example is the verb "controleren". Its original meaning was "to check". Now it has the additional meaning of "to control".

This is probably a problem found everywhere in the world. My teacher for Dutch class when I was doing MAVO, told me it was less extreme in France. He blamed it on their "arrogance", and he seemingly approved of the assimilation of English. Or rather, the application of Dutch grammatical rules to an English vocabulary.