Gratuitous Foreign Language

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    "We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary."
    —James D. Nicoll
    "I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men, and German to my horse."
    —Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor (King Carlos I of Spain)

    Truth #1: Foreign languages sound more exotic. Buying some body lotion is not the same as buying La Creme Luxueuse, and driving a car is not the same as driving a Motorwagen.

    Truth #2: Unfortunately, not many people are even that good with foreign languages they have been taught, and now people can use babelfish to translate things into languages they do not even know in the slightest.

    The result: random dialog, often awkward or incorrect, thrown around to make a dialogue seem more exotic.

    In Japan, the most common of the languages is English. In America, Spanish and French are more likely to be used. Rarely will this result in a full Bilingual Dialogue.

    Commonly used gratuitous foreign languages include:


    A Sub-Trope of this is Poirot Speak, where the gratuitous words are always the language's "simple" ones. Surprisingly Good Foreign Language, the total opposite of this one, is considered a trope because seeing it is not very common. Gratuitous foreign language in a work is sometimes corrected in translations of that work. See also Foreign Language Title.

    Compare Black Speech, when authors feel like adding an evil language to better designate an enemy.

    Examples of Gratuitous Foreign Language include:

    Chinese

    Anime and Manga

    • Shampoo in Ranma ½, and many other Chinese Girl characters. Gratuitous Chinese is usually, if not exclusively, Mandarin.
    • The character of China from Axis Powers Hetalia speaks in simple Chinese phrases on occasion (things like "Good morning!" and "No problem!") His Japanese voice actress adds to this by speaking with an exaggerated stereotypical Chinese accent.
    • Ranka Lee from Macross Frontier sings "Ni Hao Nyan" during one of her concerts. The writers likely assumed this would translate to something like "Hello (meow!)", since "Ni hao" is Mandarin for "hello", and "nyan" is the Japanese onomatopoeia for a meowing cat. However, in Chinese, "nya/nyan" means something akin to "sissy" or "gay".
      • That's not the only problem: placing an adjective after "ni hao" translates to "you're very [adjective]"...
    • The main characters of Senkou no Night Raid speak quite a bit of thickly accented Chinese.
      • And Russian...and French...and English. Probably would be justified given the setting and veristic approach of the anime. However given the horribly incorrect accents...
      • On the other hand, most Chinese characters, and also the English, American, German and Russian ones, were voiced by native speakers.
    • Terriermon's Catch Phrase, "Moumantai" from Digimon Tamers .

    Fanfic

    Film

    • In The Remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still, Klaatu meets with another of his species who had been living on Earth for a long time in the guise of a Chinese man. The two proceed to converse in Mandarin, and while Keanu Reeves tries pretty hard, he doesn't get it quite right.

    Live-Action TV

    • In the futuristic society of Firefly, the melding of societies has caused languages to become intermingled. Most prominent, alongside English, is a "Mandarin" dialect consisting mostly of cuss words.
    • There is a CSI episode that has an entire one-sided conversation in Mandarin (on the phone) and a plot point in Chinese characters.
    • And there's a House episode with a Chinese girl and her mom, who can speak English almost as well as Hugh Laurie can speak Chinese.
    • An episode of Bones has a plot revolving around a Chinese family's burial ritual. In contrast to Hugh Laurie, Emily Deschanel's Chinese is at least understandable.
      • A season 4 episode also had some rich kids attempting to sass Booth in (horrible) Chinese. Booth wasn't amused.
    • Justified in a Touched By an Angel two-part episode where the persecution of Chinese Christians is the focus, but since most of the actors were American-born (or American-raised) Chinese their accents were atrocious.

    Video Games

    • In Fallout 3, you will run into recordings, holograms and whatnot, all using the Chinese language...and every single one will make you cringe. Considering Bethesda habitually uses a small pool of voice actors for very, very large casts of NPCs, it seems unlikely that they couldn't find one guy who could actually speak the language and still stay on budget.
      • You can barely make out the words they are saying, but most of it sounds like blur mumbling due to poor pronunciation.
    • In Deus Ex, one of the locations in the game is Hong Kong. Most people you meet there speak English, though there is a monk that speaks Cantonese with no translation given. ("Please give way" and Can you speak Cantonese?") There's also some Chinese text, unfortunately most of it is complete nonsense copy-and-pasted repeatedly.
      • There's also some untranslated French lines lines in Paris.
    • Done much better in Deus Ex Human Revolution.
    • In Persona 2, Lisa Silverman is a white girl who only knows Japanese as her only language but she loves to use random Chinese phrases.

    Western Animation

    • Sagwa, the Chinese Siamese Cat has a little of this, usually basic words and phrases. The pre- and post- show funding thanks were ended in the Chinese word for "thank you".
    • Ni Hao, Kai-Lan features this much in the same way Dora the Explorer uses Spanish.

    Hawaiian

    Anime and Manga

    • The English dub of Ranma ½ has Principal Kuno peppering his speech with Hawaiian (in the original, he just used Gratuitous English).

    Western Animation

    • The opening of Lilo and Stitch uses an upbeat Hawaiian chant—except that it's actually parts of two chants about two different people. The translated result is a bit weird. Another song, Hawaiian Rollercoaster Ride, uses Pidgin English and surfer slang. Nani and Paul use Hawaiian Pidgin English, but their voice actors grew up in Hawaii.
      • According to a Hawaiian friend, the singer gets a lot of flak due to his style of forcing the Hawaiian language to match western music by pausing in the middle of words and "putting the emphasis on the wrong syllable". Potentially, he may have caused the chant(s) to become complete gibberish to Hawaiian speakers.

    Hebrew

    Theatre

    • Leonard Bernstein's Mass: A Theatre Piece for Singers, Players and Dancers mostly mixes English with church Latin, but "Sanctus" is sung trilingually in Latin, English and Hebrew.

    Web Original

    • Some examples of (get this) Did Not Do the Research tattoos may be found here.

    Hindi

    Anime and Manga

    • An episode of Gokujo Seitokai features a girl from India. The only word she ever says is "Namaste", even in totally inappropriate situations.

    Western Animation

    • The Simpsons episode "Kiss Kiss Bang Bangalore" has plenty of this. Which is doubly odd, because the language spoken in Bangalore is not Hindi at all, it's Kannada. Then again, the voice actors would have probably had an even harder time with Kannada, because it sounds like this.

    Hungarian

    Anime and Manga

    • Hungarian shows up a lot in 11eyes. The most noticeable places are the subtitles for the episodes and the Opening Narration.

    Fan Fiction

    Literature

    • The Dragaera novels created by Hungarian-American Steven Brust have a fair bit of this, as the "Fenarian" culture which predominates among Easterners (humans) is Hungarian and has that as their ancestral language, although it's often written phonetically in the novels. For instance, in one novel, Vlad uses the pseudonym Lord Maydeer. The "Maydeer" is supposedly a phonetic spelling of Magyar, what Hungarians call themselves. Unfortunately, that's not how you pronounce it. For phonetic spelling, it's really bad. The real pronunciation is more akin to "Madyar" (rough approximation, since the "gy" consonant has no easy equivalent in English - it can be best described as the sound of the "d" in the English word "dew").

    Theatre

    • Hunyak in the musical Chicago has a few lines in Hungarian (mostly in "Cell Block Tango"); Ekaterina Chtchelkanova generally mispronounces them in the movie version. In the script of the musical, many of the vowels in those lines carry incorrect accent marks, some of which are not found in the Hungarian language.

    Video Games

    • In Halo: Reach, the colonist farmers you encounter on some levels speak Hungarian. Jorge, as a Reach native, acts as translator. Many of the planet's cities and moons are named in Hungarian as well. Jorge mutters a line in Hungarian as he watches large portions of Reach being blown up from orbit. He says "Megszakad a szivem..." which translates as "This breaks my heart..."

    Western Animation

    • Star Wars: Clone Wars had the Nelvaans. The pronunciation was horrible, but the words did match up. Except for the nickname they gave Anakin. I mean "Holt Kezet" isn't even in the form of a subject.

    Norwegian

    Film

    • In The 13th Warrior, Antonio Banderas' character Ahmad Ibn Fadlan learns Norwegian by listening to men speaking (heavily accented) Norwegian around a campfire, which gradually evolves into English as he starts to learn more words. He eventually speaks up, alerting the men that he has learned their language. While they actually speak English to one another from that point onwards, they are --as far as the story is concerned—still speaking Norwegian.

    Live-Action TV

    • The title of the X-Files episode "Død Kalm" itself is an example of this. It supposedly means "Dead Calm"; død is Norwegian for dead, but kalm is not a Norwegian word. Kalm is probably made to look like a Norwegian word for calm, since there are several examples of Norwegian and English words being similar with the main difference being that the c is replaced by a k. The episode itself is littered with egregious examples of Norwegian, with one particular dialogue between the ridiculously named Trondheim and Olafsson having achieved a certain degree of infamy among Norwegian X-files fans.
    • The pilot episode of Twin Peaks contains a visiting delegation of Norwegian businessmen. Their presence and behavior in the state of Washington is apparently an attempt at a joke. They are there to buy lumber, and they are also very appreciative of the local nature and fresh air. For Norwegians to go to Washington to get lumber, nature, and fresh air would be strange, as they can get those in abundance in Scandinavia.
    • The Bones episode "Mayhem on a Cross" opens with a Black Metal Concert being interrupted by Norwegian police. Luckily, the show used a Norwegian actor and a Swedish actress for the Norwegian speaking parts. However, a running gag throughout the episode is that Brennan attempts to instruct her coworkers how to correctly pronounce the word "skalle" (skull). Ironically, though, Brennan's pronunciation attempts are arguably the worst of the lot, making the whole thing absurdly amusing to Norwegian speakers.
      • The most hillarious moment was when Dr. Edison said it and she corrected him. If you didn't know what she was trying to say you wouldn't have understood it at all, while he pronounced it quite well for someone with no knowledge of the language and it was very much understandable.

    Tabletop Games

    • Twilight 2000 mishandles Norwegian by using Norse words and names that probably are picked from Viking sagas taking place in Norway 900 years ago. It is like using "Beowulfian" words for modern English.

    Swedish

    Live-Action TV

    • True Blood has Eric and Pam conversing frequently in Swedish. Thank heavens they used Alexander Skarsgård.
      • Although apparently there is no Swedish translation for "you gold-digging whore."
        • There is "Din guldgrävande hora" (literal) or "Din giriga hora" (not literal, closer to "You greedy whore"). (The colloquial expression is "Du är ett jävla girigt fnask", i.e. "You're a bloody greedy hooker".)
        • That wasn't Swedish but Russian, spoken to an Estonian woman. Unfortunately Estonian is a Fenno-Ugric language and completely unrelated to the Slavic language family, although it's perhaps within the limits of possibility that she belongs to Estonia's Russian minority.
    • Legend of Mana had a main song, the Song of Mana, composed by Yoko Shimomura and sung in Swedish by Annika Ljungberg of the Rednex. Ironically, the game never made it to Sweden.

    Video Games

    • Empire Total War has unit responses in multiple languages. While the Swedish versions have okay pronunciation it is also painfully clear that they are direct translations of English terms.

    Western Animation

    • In the Simpsons episode "Frinkenstein", Lisa spouts some gratuitous Swedish, which is correct albeit mispronounced: "Tack för att ni förärat vår stad" (Thank you for honoring our city) becomes "Tack for att ni forarat var stad." Mentioned should be that substituting vår for var would bring the sentence to mean "Thank you for honoring every city."

    Finnish

    Advertising

    • A Korean advert for Finnish-themed bubble gum had a man in a Santa Claus suit dancing around and yelling "Hyvä hyvä" which is Finnish for "Good good!" This became a meme in late 90s Finnish internet circles.

    Comic Books

    • Snow Queen of Fables is called Lumi. Which is Finnish for snow.
      • Her siblings are called Kevat, Kesa and Syksy, respectively - "Spring", "Summer" and "Autumn", albeit missing the umlauts. Why the Snow Queen isn't called Talvi ("Winter") is anybody's guess.
    • Much like in Star Wars example given below, a Cybertronian martial art in Transformers is called Metallikato, which translates to "loss of metal (via rusting and/or deficiency)"
    • Pretty much every non-English name in Mezolith.

    Film

    • At one point in The Movie version of Charlie's Angels, the angels were having conversation in Finnish so that others would not understand them. They succeeded because the English subtitles had nothing to do with their actual words, and the best part was that in Finland the subtitles were also added in Finnish. They were translated from the English ones, because not many Finnish could understand what the girls were saying or even that is was Finnish.

    Literature

    • The Star Wars Expanded Universe has random bits of gratuitous Finnish. For example, the name of the martial art Teräs Käsi means Steel Hand (and should be conjoined). Juhani is by the way a male name. There's also the planet Taivas - sky/heaven.
    • In the book The Golden Compass there's a reference to the Nälkäinens, which means "the hungry ones".
      • The witch Serafina Pekkala also has a distincly Finnish last name.

    Live-Action TV

    • The Finnish character Piirka in the Norwegian sitcom Borettslaget speaks Swedish with gratuitous Finnish while attempting to speak Norwegian.
      • The character's name is Gratuitous Finnish in itself, actually impossible by the grammatical rules of the language. Perhaps they were aiming for 'Pirkka'.
        • In an interview with a Finnish TV channel about to air the show subbed, Stoltenberg, the show's writer and Piirka's actor (as well as the actor portraying most other characters on the show) mentioned that since most Norwegians, himself included, only knew 10 words of Finnish at most, a good portion of Piirka's "Finnish" was just Finnish sounding gibberish.

    Tabletop Games

    • Exalted has the monsters Niljake (approximately "icky/slimy thing", could also be a family of mushroom species) and Karmeus ("horribleness").

    Toys

    Arktinen: Means arctic.
    Jaa: Jää means ice, jaa is what you tell someone when you want them to split something up among multiple recipients.
    Jaatikko: Jäätikkö means glacier.
    Kylma: Kylmä means cold.
    Lumi: means snow.
    Pakastaa: means to deepfreeze.
    Talvi: means winter.

    Videogames

    • [[Final Fantasy: The 4 Heroes of Light]] has Louhi as one of the characters you meet early, being based on the witch in The Kalevala.

    Other

    Anime and Manga

    • The ending theme to Dragon Half has not only Gratuitous English, but also Gratuitous Mandarin ("yi er san si") and Gratuitous Korean ("kamsa hamnida"), all within the same song. Hey, we said it's a Surreal Theme Tune...
    • RahXephon features copious amounts of gratuitous Nahuatl, of all languages, as well as a bit of gratuitous Esperanto.
    • The Bleached Underpants remake of Fate/stay night was given the inexplicable subtitle "Réalta Nua", Irish for "(A) New Star".
    • Clannad managed to do the same. They were aiming for "clann", the Irish word for family.
    • Axis Powers Hetalia usually tries to get the characters to use at least one word of their native language on occasion (they all embody countries).
      • Of course, their being the embodiment of those countries almost excuses them. The few sequences that were spoken in heavily, heavily accented English are somewhat less so.
        • To elaborate, you get phrases like "a little shit cleaning" as a term for cleaning out the shed. It is probably the only time you will ever see a Lithuanian character with a better accent than the American one. Keep in mind this did NOT make the Lithuanian's English GOOD.
    • The anime version of Lilo and Stitch titled Stitch! has gratuitous Okinawan in place of gratuitous Hawaiian.
    • Mahou Sensei Negima manages to avert this (at least in the original manga) for the most part; almost all the magic spells being in Latin or Greek, and are accurate the vast majority of the time. Unfortunately, the anime adaptation wasn't so lucky.
      • However the first anime adaption also averted this with the characters in English class reading passages in perfect English, pronunciation wise anyway.
    • The anime of Ah! My Goddess has Senbei, who shifts rapidly to Gratuitous French, Russian, Spanish, & Italian, as well as engaging in Brief Accent Imitation.
    • Durarara!! has a conversation in Russian between the black Russian Simon and and a couple of Russian tourists in Russian. It's obvious that none of the voice actors actually speak Russian.
    • Yami Marik from Yu-Gi-Oh!. In the Japanese version, when activating the various effects of The Winged Dragon of Ra, he chance Heiratic Phrases.
      • Then, in The Movie called Pyramid of Light, there is some fake Egyptian-sounding chanting by Anubis in the English version.

    Comic Books

    Fanfic

    • Gratuitous Welsh can be found in Torchwood fanfiction, despite creators and actors stating the characters probably don't know it, at least beyond simple phrases like "Croeso i Gymru".
      • Also in Stargate SG 1 fanfiction. Although in part this is due to how the Ori arc was introduced (the legend of Excalibur and a very badly mangled pronunciation of "Myrddin"), some of it does predate that due to the Series 5 episode "2001" (the Volians' language was related to Welsh).
    • Like the source material, expect at least some Axis Powers Hetalia fanfic to make use of this, regardless of language.
    • The Son of the Emperor uses both German and French mixed in with English. Somewhat justified as the characters are speaking in a foreign language and this is shown through the use of foreign words.

    Film

    • Pick any speaker of Vietnamese and they would tell you that the title character's supposedly Vietnamese lines in Ultraviolet the movie are complete and total garbage.
    • While the film itself is a complete and utter aversion, the script of Inglourious Basterds plays the trope straight. Most of the dialogue is written in English (with instructions regarding the actual language to be used during filming, and whether the exchange is subtitled or not) but some gratuitous phrases are left in. Example (French dialogue, subtitled):
      • COL LANDA: Merci be coupe Monsieur Lapadite, but no wine. This being a dairy farm one would be safe in assuming you have milk?
      • CHARLOTTE: Oui.
      • COL LANDA: Then milk is what I prefer.
        • Wait...does he really say "be coupe" or does he say "beaucoup" (bo-koo) correctly?
    • "Hakuna matata" is a Swahili phrase that is literally translated as "There are no worries".

    Literature

    • The Dune universe is positively riddled with words seemingly inspired by or derived from Arabic and Farsi (Justified Trope, seeing as most of the future religions have some Islam in them). Even Hebrew shows up once or twice.
      • Qfisatz ha-derekh (compare to Dune's Kwisatz Haderach) is a magical ability ascribed to some real-world Chassidic holy men.
    • The Star Wars Expanded Universe has random bits from a number of languages:
      • Huttese is basically gratuitous Quechua.
      • The EU is also fond of Hebrew (see: any body in the Endor system); at least one case was deliberate, however.
      • The lyrics to "Duel of the Fates" are a gratuitous Sanskrit translation of a Gaelic poem about trees fighting each other.
    • In Mark Twain's travel stories, his buddy starts to insert lots of Gratuitous Foreign Language (Fiji, various Indian languages and others) into his story. For no particular reason except that "every travel writer does it like that". Twain chastises him for doing this.
    • German philosopher Oswald Spengler's non-fiction book The Decline of the West. There are Gratuitous Hebrew, Gratuitous Arab, Gratuitous Russian, Gratuitous Hindi/Sanskrit(?), Gratuitous Chinese, Gratuitous Latin and Gratuitous Old Greek (often, even with Greek letters). Mostly used for concepts which are genuine of one culture and would be misunderstood if a common but incorrect translation was used.
    • Vlad Tepes in Count and Countess uses Turkish for all military terms. Makes sense, because he served as a Janissary for the Ottoman Empire as a boy.
    • The web-novel Domina loves this trope. It starts with lots of Latin, including the title of the book itself and every chapter. Later one of the fey slips into bad Irish when she's angry, then Lizzy speaks Japanese to Akane. A few chapters after that, Lizzy and a giant have a conversation in untranslated Icelandic, and it's mentioned (and shown) that vampires tend to swear in Romanian. Considering that the city is supposed to be where the world dumps its criminals, it makes some sense.

    Live Action TV

    • Zelenka of Stargate Atlantis will often spout unsubtitled Czech, which is nearly always a Bilingual Bonus. The team is also, by concept, international, and due to the series being filmed in Vancouver, many of the extras are multilingual. You can hear snippets of French, Spanish, German, and others in the background.
    • In Friends, there's an episode with a lot of Dutch in it. Due to horrible pronunciation, it can take Dutch people a while to figure out it's actually Dutch. Particularly funny is when Gunther says, 'Jij hebt seks met ezels' ('You have sex with donkeys'); the Dutch audience laughs, but the 'television laugh' doesn't start until Ross starts looking up what it means in his 'How to: Dutch' book.


    Music

    • The Irish doom metal band Mael Mordha use gratuitous Irish. See, for example, the song "Realms of Insanity":

    Ní h-anbhann ach lúbach
    Gus a samhail ag lion mo cheann
    Do na Realms of Insanity
    Glóireach,
    Her evensong appeared to break
    From serenity to winter gale
    as control She took.

      • Closer to the spirit of the trope, they often insert random Irish words into their lyrics either because it rhymes or because it helps evoke a folksy feel. Observe:

    Far beneath Mann is this land of Mac Lir
    What a wondrous place, this magical Tír

    • The title of Coldplay's Mylo Xyloto appears to be gratuitous Greek. Mylo=mill, xyloto=wooden. Sawmill?
    • Sound Horizon is particularly fond of using foreign languages of all sorts in their albums, particularly after Aramary left.
    • PDQ Bach's "Birthday Ode to 'Big Daddy' Bach" has one part mixing not only German and English but also Spanish and Japanese:

    Three times high! (High!)
    Number one! (Yes!)
    Three times high! (High!)
    Nummer eins! (Ja!)
    Three times high! (High!)
    Numero uno! (Si!)
    Three times high! (High!)
    Ichi-ban! (Hai!)

    Tabletop Games

    • An American example of Gratuitous Polish: Twilight 2000 RPG. The first scenarios were set in Poland and to anyone at least basically familiar with the language it's clear that the authors simply ignored grammar and somehow assumed that Polish has no declination. Every word is in the nominative case even when the purported translation suggests that it shouldn't be, giving the impression they just looked up words in the dictionary and strung them together. They also ignored Polish diacritics (which is understandable as it was the eighties, and no text editor had them) - when the writers did remember that there was supposed to be a diacritic somewhere they sometimes put it on the wrong letter (no, there isn't a city called "Poznán"), misspellings were frequent, and sometimes displayed hilarious (to Poles) ignorance of the country. To wit: There's a ship called Wisla Krolowa, which supposed to mean "Queen of the Vistula". It really means "Vistula the queen". The engine of the ship is known Homar Piec, which is supposed to mean "Lobster cooker", and it means "Lobster Oven" or even (given the lack of diacritics) "Lobster Five". What's more, lobsters aren't even familiar to Poles (and especially not in the reality of the game). That Twilight 2000 is considered to be an example of Shown Their Work by RPG standards is an indication of how endemic Did Not Do the Research is in the medium.

    Video Games

    • For that matter, the nonsense lyrics of the Touhou fansong Marisa Stole The Precious Thing include Gratuitous English, Gratuitous German, Gratuitous Mandarin and arguably Gratuitous Japanese.
    • All of the Arcana in Arcana Heart have attack names in many different foreign languages. For instance, Partinias, the Arcanum of Love, uses Gratuitous Greek (Roz Sfaira = "pink ball/sphere").
    • The explorer named Pavel in Professor Layton and the Curious Village...well, where do we even begin? Apparently all that exploring foreign lands has led him to throw in random gratuitous words from the language of every country he's ever visited. Spanish, French, Japanese and Mandarin all show up.
      • And the name Pavel is Czech.
    • Suikoden loves this trope. With the world having elements of various real nations written in, it means you get a lot of this in terms of the names of people, places, weapons and others. Results in Gratuitous English, German, Russian, and pretty much any other language they thought was Foreign Sounding Gibberish.
      • Most epic example of this is the ending song for the first game, which was supposedly Portuguese as written by a Japanese man before babelfish existed and pronounced by Japanese singers.
      • When Suikoden Tierkreis came out, one of the end game songs sounded like German (which makes sense given the name), but was unidentifiable to the point that there was debate of which Germanic language/dialect was being mutilated as it was incomprehensible to German speaking Europe.
    • The Viking speech files in Age of Empires II are actually mangled Icelandic. The builder for instance says "Hussasmiþur" which means house-builder, instead of just Smiður or even Húsasmiður. It makes playing the Vikings a hoot, since it's so horribly pronounced.
      • Modern Icelandic is actually very close to Old Norse, the language of the Vikings. The mispronunciations could just be the original Old Norse words from which the modern Icelandic words were derived from.
    • Thunder Force VI makes use of two Gratuitous non-Japanese, non-English languages: the Galaxy Federation's primary language is the ancient and long-obsolete Tangut script, and the Orn Empire's primary language is Mongolian.
    • The Soldier of Fortune games have Gratutious Slavic (Russians and Czech mooks say the same phrases), Gratuitous Arabic, Gratuitous African language (mooks in Uganda and Sudan sound exactly the same), Gratuitous Spanish ("grenado" when throwing a grenade, which should be "granada"), Gratuitous Chinese, etc. Or it may just be Foreign Sounding Gibberish.
    • The Wii game Punch-Out!! averts this hard. Every non-English-speaking foreign boxer (except for King Hippo) speaks in their legitimate foreign language.
    • Similarly averted in Civilization V. As with Punch-Out!!, every leader speaks in their native tongue (within reason) from Alexander speaking Ancient Greek to Montezuma speaking Nahuatl.
    • Ryu ga Gotoku (Yakuza) 4 brings us Gratuitous Filipino in a massage parlor in the game. The title, "Pilipinas Masahe" ("Masaheng Filipino" or simply "Hilot") says it all. Oh, and would you like the "Bumalik sa braso sa likod ng mga paa sa likod?" (which makes no sense in Filipino!) Pretty sure you wouldn't want such a mouthful for a full-body massage, eh?
    • Paarthurnax in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim peppers his English dialogue with phrases in Dragon language. Of course, he IS a dragon, so it's his native tongue. And it's a made-up language anyway.

    Web Original

    • Inverted in Chaos Fighters, where the gratuitous local language (read:Malay) is used in an English work by a Malaysian. RAKSA cranked this Up to Eleven with gratuitous Kelantan and Terengganu accented Malay as early as the first chapter.
    • Ilivais X has Iriana make an elaborate speech while basically having an orgasm...except it alternates between Vietnamese, Icelandic, French, Serbian, and Creole of all things. None of which she actually knows, and all of which were churned out with Google Translate.
    • The Sidepork Pandemonium episode of Regular Ordinary Swedish Meal Time features the cook karate chop butter in half, indicated by a Korean flag in the top right corner and subtitles (in Korean).
    • The Veil of Madness parodied this in the second part - there was an alien "historical" movie about their first contact with humans ("Whoever directed this had an interesting imagination. We are bipedal, that much they got down..."):

    Apparently on the 'Soopremetchy', the captain... hang on... it still makes me laugh when I think of it.
    Those idiots got our whole language wrong. It's like they took whatever words of our language they thought sounded coolest and mashed em together to form our language. The grammatical errors and accent are so atrocious for a second I thought 'What the fuck is he saying?' So the captain... wait... the captain says, in the subtitles "Interesting. Fresh Meat. This will make a nice change to the usual prey." Though in our language the way he says it is "Mash-up! Tasty food. Nice kill hunting spree!"
    And the other 'human' in subtitles replies 'Yes Overcaptain.' Though he says 'Affirmative Caption.'(No I did not spell that wrong, that's what he/she/it said).

    Western Animation

    • One of the Asterix animated films, Asterix in America, had local language made of American geographical names.
      • Which actually is less stupid than it sounds, when you realize that many of these names were of Native origin. That said, it's all Rule of Funny.
    • "Shrek" is the phonetic rendering of a German and Yiddish word for "horror" or "terror".

    Real Life

    • The second page quote is suspected not to be from Charles V at all, but rather an invention of one of his biographers. The best evidence for this is the fact that Charles was born in Ghent (now in the Flanders region of Belgium), considered himself Dutch, and grew up speaking Dutch, which the Dutch themselves have called "not a language, but a disease of the throat." On the other hand, the distinction between German and Dutch was not as clear then as it is now, and it is very possible that he was actually insulting God (or at least the Church), women, and men: circumstances at the time would have forced him to speak the languages he mentioned (the Spanish Church was unusually powerful, custom dictated you speak to women in the "nicest" language you knew, and French was the language of diplomacy), leaving him able to speak only to his horse in his native tongue.
    • When officials asked for the Welsh translation of a road sign, they thought the reply was what they needed. Unfortunately, the e-mail response to Swansea council said in Welsh: "I am not in the office at the moment. Send any work to be translated". So that was what went up under the English version which barred lorries from a road near a supermarket. "When they're proofing signs, they should really use someone who speaks Welsh," said journalist Dylan Iorwerth.
    • Sir Henry Longstaff, the first British governor of its Hong Kong colony, wondered why the Chinese natives got even more inscrutable in his presence and why he could hear the odd hastily supressed snigger as he passed. Rather like Biggus Dickus, a man who wanks higher than any in Wome, a clumsy atempt had been made to translate the name "Longstaff" into Chinese. Unfortunately, the pictograms chosen to sign proclamations in Chinese by the British rulers literally meant "Huge Erect Penis" rather than "Long Staff"....
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