In different languages meme

Do you know how to say goodbye in these languages? Why not test yourself by seeing how many you know and then try to learn the rest? After all, it can be very handy to familiarise yourself with common phrases for different countries, you never know when you might need them!

Do you want to learn more than just the common phrases? Twin English Centres offers courses for students who want to learn English in London, Eastbourne or Dublin, find your ideal course now.

Some things are very readily associated with language learning: textbooks, conjugation tables and embarrassment are a few things that automatically come to mind.

But if you’re really committed to learning a new language, it’s worthwhile to understand the sense of humor that surrounds the language. There’s a big difference between textbook French and colloquial French, and as far as easily accessible, of-the-moment windows into foreign culture go, memes are basically modernized flashcards.

Here are a few foreign language memes, presented for your entertainment — and a little bit of explanation to go with them, so you can feel smart when you tweet about them.

Lady Reportera (Mexico)

Via KnowYourMeme.com

Lady Reportera (Lady Reporter) took off in Mexico last year when a reporter from TV Azteca was seen being carried by two locals during her coverage of the floods in Puebla to avoid wetting her shoes.

Naturally, the internet is the internet, and people were quick to photoshop #LadyReportera into a variety of new situations: like the friendly jog that Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto shared.

Forever Outraged (Germany)

Via Pinterest

This meme became a popular way to poke fun at the statements of Germany’s various Central Councils, which often go on record in the news for being “outraged.” This caption roughly translates to “The Central Council of the Tile Table is indignant.”

Preved, Medved (Russia)

Via Cracked

“Preved Medved,” which is a deliberately misspelled way of saying “hello bear” in Russian (think: doge and LOLcats), actually started in the U.S., according to Cracked. As the legend goes, actor John Lurie made a silly painting featuring a bear surprising a couple, er, “frolicking” in the woods. The bear got photoshopped a bunch — and the meme even found its way to the cover of Newsweek.

Norwegian Fry (Norway)

Via BuzzFeed

It’s often the case that memes know no borders: like this one involving Fry from Futurama, which is usually paired with some version of “Not sure if (blank), or if just (blank).”

This Norwegian version roughly translates to: “Not sure if I hate my job, or if I just hate working.”

Miss Universe Fail (Philippines)

Via Blame It On My Gypsy Heart

Steve Harvey’s epic Miss Universe fail was heard — and memeified — around the world. Harvey initially announced Miss Colombia as the winner, only to then hand the crown over to Miss Philippines.

This Tagalog meme depicts an imaginary dialog between Miss Philippines and Miss Bulgaria, who’s encouraging the reticent Miss Philippines to “go get it.”

Nice Horse (Sweden)

Via Cracked

The LOLcats trope also made it to Sweden. “Snel Hest” is a slightly misspelled version of “snall hast,” which means “nice horse.” Most of the Snel Hest memes involve mathematical depictions of what happens when you add things to the horse, like the one above: “nice horse” + “wheat” + “pat” = “happy horse.”

About

Differenze Linguistiche (English: Linguistic Differences) is a series of vertical rage comics illustrating various stereotypes or misperceptions associated with Western languages and their phonetic systems. The comics are usually centered around a single word or a phrase that is phonetically translated into multiple languages.

Origin

The meme originated with the Italian Facebook group Differenze Linguistiche created on February 27th, 2012. The first image example (shown right below) presented different ways to say "I love you" in Italian, English, French, Spanish and with emphasis on the rather harsh-sounding German translation "Ich Liebe Dich."

Precursor

Humorous illustration of linguistic differences has been noted prior to the rage comic series. The most notable prototype of the series (shown left), which highlights the Spanish word for banana ("plátano") with a look of disapproval" emoticon, was created sometime in 2010 and posted via Reddit on October 27th, 2010. A similar image for the word pineapple (shown right) also followed after.

Spread

Throughout March of 2012, the rage comic series was picked up by internet humor blogs and communities across multiple language regions, spawning derivative images on a number of Spanish, Italian and English-language websites, including Memebase, FunnyJunk and 9gag among others. As the meme continued to spread, the Facebook page saw significant growth in subscription and even led to a copycat Facebook page with the same name. In less than a month since its launch, the official Facebook page has accumulated 16,000 likes.

Notable Examples

The comics adhere to a standard three-column format: the first column has flags representing the language, the second column has a rage face describing the perceived "emotion" of the phrase in that language, and the third column has the translation of the phrase in the respective language. The majority of the examples make fun of German and its rough-sounding words, in comparison to softer-sounding Romance languages.

Cultural Differences

In early July of 2017, an iteration of the meme in which two countries' cultural differences were compared against each other began growing popular on /r/dankmemes. On July 2nd, Redditor AceCheeze posted the first version comparing England the United States, with the punchline being that what the UK calls "playground" the US calls "The Middle East." The post gained over 4,800 points (shown below).

This was the first of dozens of posts that would appear on the subreddit in the coming two days using a similar format to compare between two countries. The first few compared America and the United Kingdom, though different comparisons soon followed. The most popular, comparing the United States and Canada, gained over 14,000 points (shown below, left).

Guttural Languages

In popular culture, certain languages like German have been characterized as "guttural" languages, especially by English speakers or the speakers of Romance languages (such as Italian and Spanish). The speakers of these languages are mostly unfamiliar with sounds that are pronounced from the back of the throat, which are prevalent in German. Although English is a Germanic language as well, its lexicon has been heavily influenced by French (thanks to the Norman conquest of England in the Middle Ages), and thus it has many words and sounds in common with the Romance languages.

Read Full Entry

The latest from KYM

The world is really into memes. Reddit has its own meme economy, a community that appraises new formats as if they were stocks. The World Cup has spawned memes mocking the on-field overacting of Neymar, the Brazilian soccer star, in languages from Spanish to German, Dutch, Hungarian, and beyond. The many memes of China poke fun at Xi Jinping and call out out-of-touch celebrities.

How do all of these different people refer to their memes? I asked SwiftKey, a popular smartphone keyboard app acquired by Microsoft a couple years ago, for data on English words commonly used by people typing in languages other than English. I wanted to know which concepts from the English language were proving popular around the world.

The results showed that the word “meme” has followed the concept it describes across the globe, creating a shared vocabulary around a phenomenon that was born on the internet. It has spread like, well, a meme.

The meaning of “meme”

“Meme” has a specific meaning on the internet. Typically, it refers to a kind of joke template: an image accompanied by a standard format for adding text to flesh out the details of that scene. For example, the now-classic scene of an anime character looking directly at a butterfly and asking, “Is this a pigeon?” has been altered in innumerable ways to convey the blind ignorance of not knowing what is right in front of you.

There is a more general definition of “meme,” however, dating back to 1976. The original definition describes it as a container for an idea or a unit of culture, like a fashion trend or blues melody. That container spreads throughout culture through a process of natural selection: Memes that capture a popular feeling or cultural moment get passed on, while those less applicable to contemporary culture die out. If this sounds kind of like how genes work, you’ve got the right idea—the term “meme” was coined by Richard Dawkins, a man who has been criticized for making everything about genes.

According to that definition, and the data collected by SwiftKey, “meme” is a highly successful meme. But the “culture” in this case is not one linguistic group or nation—it is the entire internet. The data on the most popular English words in other languages shows that the word has proven useful and popular in several languages, having made its way into and across Europe.

Most of the top results from SwiftKey are proper nouns; first names or or the names of popular technologies, like WhatsApp or Skype.

“Meme” is not like those. It is a noun referring to a general concept, like “supermarket” or “jazz.” And it appears on the top-500 list for over half of the twenty languages SwiftKey provided data for, based on user input collected from January to March of this year. “Memes” (plural) was the second-most common English word among users typing on a Spanish-language keyboard. “Meme” was 14th for that group—much higher if we remove a host of first names like “Jenny” and “Nelson”—and right above “wifi.” The word ranks 13th in French, behind “Fred.”

This might seem obvious: We know that memes are popular worldwide. But the fact that the data comes from SwiftKey makes it particularly striking, because it’s based on what people are typing on their smartphone keyboards. On smartphones, language is at its most colloquial and rapid. It’s texting and tweeting. So, in all of the languages where “meme” is prominent, it has become a natural word that people go to without thinking. It’s not a foreign word they look up while drafting a thoughtful email or an essay. It’s part of their linguistic furniture.

The word “meme,” then, is an example of culture being created on a global scale, facilitated by the internet. Sure, it’s still not in the top 500 English words for other languages in the SwiftKey dataset, like Russian, Swedish, or Thai. But there’s no need to explain what a “meme” is to speakers of French, Czech, or Dutch. The exact same word exists in those languages with the exact same meaning. You don’t even have to translate it—they, like us English speakers, already have the virus.