As Long As It Sounds Foreign - Television Tropes & Idioms

Although the English used by the paramilitaries in Excel Saga is grammatically perfect, it's apparently delivered by actors who haven't a clue what the words are intended to mean (and only the vaguest grasp of English pronunciation).
- This is actually deliberate parody of the trope - the Japanese subtitles (which the English subs of the scene follow) are far more eloquent, often to the point where they have very little to do with what is spoken.
- It's also lampshaded in the English dub. Originally when the soldier asks her "What is your purpose?" in a really strong Japanese accent Excel just responds "I don't know." In the dub she says "A big fish?"
Singer Eri Kawai admitted that a lot of songs in ARIA have totally nonsensical lyrics, in an attempt to make them sound vaguely Italian. One song, a canzone sung by Alice during her graduation ceremony, has some verses in Esperanto, likely to achieve the same effect without becoming too silly.
The Tales of Symphonia OVA has the song Almateria, and while it has some significant words thrown in here and there, it's mostly pleasant-sounding gibberish.
Done to a ridiculous degree in episode 52 of Hayate The Combat Butler where "Italian" ranges from reciting Italian foods to saying anime/manga related references with bad pseudo-Italian accents. Considering the nature of the show, this trope was almost certainly done deliberately.
There are panels from Urusei Yatsura of Lum's mom speaking in Mah-Jong tiles that combined with her Chinese-style dress (implies "As Long As It Looks Chinese") and a French lady speaking in... interesting picture combinations in Lupin III.
- And early in the manga, where French and Chinese commentators on Ataru's game of tag with Lum spoke in, respectively, inane phrasebook style questions and Chinese food names.
In the manga Peace Maker, which is set in the American Southwest during the late 1800s (you know, a Western), a lot of the character names are... unlikely. The main character's name is Hope, which wouldn't be so unusual if he weren't a man. His Morality Pet is a little girl named Nicola, which is a guy's name, and at one point they encounter an elderly woman named Joshua. The series is otherwise enjoyable, but it's apparent that the mangaka didn't know what names were for what.
- The rule that girls' names end in 'a' just doesn't work nowadays, does it. Too many exceptions.
In Macross Frontier, the on-screen displays populated with English filler text use completely irrelevant excerpts from, for example, the Adobe Flash Player (or Adobe CS?) EULA and an article about the appearance of Oakley sunglasses in some bicycle or motorcycle event.
Sharon Apple's pop song "Idol Talk" in Macross Plus is completely untranslatable into French. The words are French, but the actual meaning is total gibberish.
- Much of Yoko Kanno's music from Cowboy Bebop also has a similar affectation: the lyrics are in a pseudo-Frenchish language.
  - The piece "Green Bird" is literally made of this trope. I spent the better part of an afternoon determined to find out what the lyrics meant before finally stumbling across a site telling me that they don't mean anything.
In Gash Bell, Kiyomaro is running "tests" on a stone tablet (petrified demon). After a while, he starts shouting random spells and demon names at it, since it has writing in the same foreign language as the spellbooks.
Code Geass. Many characters from the Britannian Empire, that is supposed to be an alternate-reality version of either UK or US, have ridiculously non-English names(coughRivalzcough), even surnames as first names (Nunnally sounds like an Irish surname, Lelouch is a French one). On the other hand, there are some characters with quite acceptable names, such as Gilbert G.P. Guilford.
- Lampshaded by Marianne vi Britainnia who was of low birth, and may for all we know be from France, along with C.C.! That would explain Lelouch having a French name. It would also explain C.C.'s naturist recreation in the Church with the Immortal Witch nun (The Nameless).
- Not to mention the royal titles: Lelouch vi Britannia? Schneizel el Britannia? Cornelia li Britannia? Charles zi Britannia? What the heck are those supposed to be? Stick with "of," "de," "da," "von," "van" etc.
  - The "vi" 'zi" "li" things are used to indicate that each of them have diffrent mothers, and seeing how many wives Charles has, I guess that some had to be made up.
- With a lot of the surnames though it seems like the writer just opened up a French furnishing catalog and picked whatever words he thought sounded good, so we end up with names that translate to things like Lelouch and Nunnally Red Lamp, Shirley Window, and Rivalz World of Wool Brushes.
FLCL, or ''Fooly Cooly," was thusly entitled because the meaningless phrase, according to the design staff, "sounded English."
Hellsing's Walter Dollneas has a surname consisting of two Welsh words that don't often appear together, let alone appear in a surname. Further Seras Victoria seems to use English names but Japanese name order (family name first), although 'Seras' is not a common surname in English. Further, Integra Hellsing uses the male salutation 'Sir' despite being female.
- This is somewhat subverted, as she is legally a man.
- The Seras thing is theorized to be a misspelling- it is extremely close to "Ceres", the Roman name of the Greek goddess Demeter- and, in the original Dracula novel which the series draws on, the boat that takes Drac to England is called the Demeter. Unfortunately, somebody misspelled it, and the reference was ruined.
Light of Death Note is not a translation of Hikari. It's a different pronunciation of the character for "moon", which is usually rendered as "tsuki", but in his case it is pronounced "Raito." Which is almost identical to the pronunciation for "Light".
- Most of the Death Note victims were also examples of this trope, as was L, whose real name is L Lawliet. In Death Note 13: How to Read, the writer of the manga admits that he made up the names of the victims randomly, so that no real names would show up as having been written down in the Death Note.
- The Death Note names also suffer from the creator romanizing them himself. This means that 'aw' is pronounced like a long 'o' and 'ie' is pronounced like the letter 'i' - with no exceptions. Which makes L's name pronounced like "Lowlight." What Do You Mean Its Not Symbolic?
The aforementioned Death Note contains a further example of this trope: at one point, Light kills a dozen FBI agents. Despite the FBI agents obviously being Americans, only a couple of them have American-sounding names (Ray Penbar being the most acceptable)
- And then there's the ex-CIA agent Hal Lidner. All right, that's actually a reasonably American name, but how many women do you know named "Hal"? In the last episode, her name is revealed to actually be Halle, which makes more sense.
- The Television Tie In Novel "Another Note" is even worse in this regard. No-one thinks twice about murder victims with names like "Quarter Queen" and "Backyard Bottomslash". Apparently, the names were chosen by just taking random words from an English dictionary. This one isn't Tsugumi Ohba's fault, though - someone else wrote the novel, apparently misinterpreting Ohba's "no real names" rule wildly.
- The worst of the lot, though, has to be the allegedly British "Quillsh Wammy". I mean, Quillsh.
  - This troper distinctly remembers a Fan Sub in which the name is rendered as "Kelsey Waymeet" (which is probably closer to what they were originally aiming at) for precisely this reason.
Freesia Yagyu from Jubei-chan 2 is half-Japanese, half-Russian. Her first name, however, does not exist in either culture.
Train Heartnet from Black Cat is one of the goofier examples of this trope.
- Slightly justified because it doesn't take place in our universe ? Lots of other names are just plain weird. (A notable exception is Kyoko who comes from "Jipang" - an alternate Japan.)
Rally Vincent from Gunsmith Cats. Seriously, I have never met or even heard of an American named "Rally". (Her real name is Irene.)
- It's a secondary joke based on the R=L stereotype/confusion of Japanese speakers. Switch the letters around and see what name you get.
  - Which is the name of her father.
- Ditto Rally Dawson.
Baccano! - Expect characters to be given names like Jacuzzi Splott and go onboard a train graciously named the Flying Pussyfoot.
- To be fair, Pussyfoot, lest we forget, wasn't, nor is it now, a dirty word, but an old fashioned one with an entirely clean and reasonable meaning: "to go or move in a stealthy or cautious manner." The fact that it can be taken as an innuendo is a different matter all together.
- This may have led to an actual translation within a mistranslation involving "Chick". Although that's his name in the Japanese version as well, he has a brother named Tock, leading to the idea that his name is actually supposed to be Tick.
  - This does actually make sense, because the Japanese language doesn't really have a "Ti" sound. Where you would expect a "Ti" you get a "Chi" in the pronunciation. The relevent symbol is ち.
- Also, Ladd Russo might be an example of this. Lad wouldn't be that odd of a nickname, especially for a guy whose kind of a Psychopathic Manchild, but not only is it spelled Ladd here, it is actually his proper name.
Subverted in Nodame Cantabile not only by having actual German speakers but by doing an entire segment IN German but re-dubbed in Japanese
Spoofed in Hayate The Combat Butler in episode 52, which featured the Sicilian Mafia. As they chase Hayate, they radio to each other saying things like "Barbecue! Pancake!", translated onscreen as "Target Lost!"
Saiyuki gives the female name Hazel to a male priest... Slightly offset by the fact that he is rather Bishonen, anyway.
- Considering Hazel's mentor's name was "Filbert", possibly this is a sneaky way of saying Western religion is nuts?
- Word Of God said it was by combining the words "Beisun" (a type of alcohol) and "angel" and mucking with the pronunciation until you get "Heizeru." His full name is "Hazel Grouse," a type of bird, thematically linking him to Ukoku, who is heavily associated with crows.
Bleach. Tite Kubo needs to be slapped around the head a few times with a Spanish textbook before he's allowed to even think about Arrancar again. EVER.
- Hey, the guy deserves a point or two for making separate but fitting meanings in both Spanish and Japanese.
  - He runs the line from dead-on to total failure. The only serious screw-ups This Troper saw are Grimmjow's surname (Jagerjaques is a mix of a the German word for hunter and the French version of John) and Nnoitra's sword. (There is no way in hell Santa Teresa means "Praying Mantis"
  - ~~True. Praying Mantis is actually "Mantis Religiosa."~~ Scratch that. Apparently "Santa Teresa is an alternate name for praying mantis.
  - See, because they always look like they're prayin', and saints pray all the time.
- Which brings us to Tesla's zanpakuto. Considering that he turns into Manbearpig, his zanpakuto should be called "Facóquero" (wart hog) instead of "Verruga" (wart).
- And don't forget the Quincy. "Seele Schneider" and "Licht Regen" is what you get when you translate to German with Babelfish.
  - Kind of ironic that "seele schneider" translates to "soul cutter" which is also one of the translations for Zanpaktou.
Femto from Berserk - "Femto"? Really? That sounds about three femtochucks of Badass...
- It's a math prefix
  - Actually, the name is taken from a character of one of Cordwainer Smith's Instrumentality of Man short stories. Cordwainer Smith is big in Japan.
- Does that really count? He's a demon, they don't usually have "realistic" names. His fellow Godhand members are named Void, Slan, Udik and Conrad. (Femto's just what they call him at work, anyway - you know him better as Griffith.)
All of the Mobile Suit Gundam series are positively rife with Foreign Sounding Gibberish names, some more successful than others.
In one episode of Sailor Moon, Ami gives a student a printout of what she says is a NASA website. The printout is not gibberish. What it is, however, is the lyrics to "Danger Zone" from the movie Top Gun.
- Don't forget the occasional English-spoken phrases being a combination of English and Japanese or simply very grammatically incorrect. "Let's dancing" comes to mind.
Fafner in the Azure has a supposedly Irish character named "Kanon Memphis", which doesn't sound like the sort of name anyone would have, let alone an Irish person.
Umineko No Naku Koro Ni actually does a pretty good job of having Western names. There's Eva, Maria, Rosa, Rudolf, George, Jessica, Battler- wait a minute...
- Let's just say there are reasons for that name that have been touched upon in the Visual Novel, and probably will be in the anime at some point. This troper is more confused as to why a Japanese family would name all their kids with western first names.
  - Kinzo's obsessed with Western culture, and from there it became something like a family tradition, although that doesn't explain Kyrie's name, which is a rare, yet also Western name.
  - "Kirie" (same pronunciation) is a perfectly acceptable Japanese name, and is what her parents had in mind when they named her. She probably later chose to romanize it with a "y" to fit in with the rest of the Ushiromiyas.
Somewhat subverted in episode 10 of Ghost In The Shell Stand Alone Complex, where in-show foreigners Suzuki Sato and Tanaka Watanabe, both CIA agents, don't bother to check their Japanese aliases for simple things like using two surnames as a full name before entering the country. The Japanese officials with whom they interact are understandably befuddled upon seeing their calling cards. They're obnoxious Americans with their own sinister agenda and we're supposed to dislike them anyway, so...
Robin's Calling Your Attacks from One Piece. It mixes Spanish, French and English.
D.Gray-Man, spectacularly so with the "Portuguese" Tyki Mikk's name. This troper can spot at least 4 blatant errors in this name alone.
- He has nothing on "Arystar Krory," which is particularly egregious given that he's named after an actual person. Whose name was spelled "Aleister Crowley." At least the author did manage one normal name; the (British) hero is named Allen Walker.

Close Anime and Manga

Batman example: Ra's Al-Ghul's daughter, Talia, uses the "surname" Al-Ghul, despite the Arabic patronymic not working that way, but kind of makes sense as her name would thus be "Talia, of the Demon". The trouble is that she then uses the "Anglicized" variant, "Talia Head", which translates the wrong word. Maybe "Talia Demon" wasn't subtle enough.
- Even worse, her son with Batman (and I do not refer to Damien) is named Ibn al Xu'ffasch, 'Son of the Bat'. Ibn is not meant to be a name; it's used like 'Ahmad ibn Abdullah', 'Ahmad son of Abdullah'. Basically, the poor kid doesn't have a proper name.
  - It should be Khufash, not Xu'ffasch.
  - Ibn Raschid and Ibn Sina (Averroes and Avicenna) are two of the most famous Islamic philosophers—many cultures with patronymics use them as forms of address. Talia should probably be Talia bint al-Ra's (which is Talia Head), since her dad is the Head of the organization called al-Ghul.
The time displaced DC character Manitou Raven is said to be from the native American tribe that eventually became the Apache. Manitou (meaning "spirit") is actually an Algonquin word.
- For Europeans and others who may not know where the Apaches and Algonquins live relative to each other, this is about the equivalent of assuming a Norwegian word or myth can equate to a Georgian one.

Close Comic Books

A famous example is in the classic Charlie Chaplin silent comedy, Modern Times. In it, Charlie is expected to sing a song, but loses his cuffs that have the lyrics written on them. Desperate, Charlie improvises a song using gibberish that sounds like a mix of French and Italian and pantomimes a story as he sings. That product of his quick thinking brings the house down. Chaplin did this to keep his Tramp character international and not limited to a specific language.
- Chaplin's Hitler-like role in The Great Dictator delivers a foaming-at-the-mouth speech in Tomanian, one of the funniest fake foreign languages ever: a pastiche mixture of English, German and Yiddish nonsense in which such words as "Sauerkraut" and "Katzenjammer" recur.
The terrorists in Die Hard are portrayed as German, but speak a language that can't be identified as such. Because of this, they were identified as "European" in German versions of the film.
- This was done intentionally so the German viewers would not associate them with the RAF . Something similar was done with the Arabian terrorists in The Sum of All Fears.
  - It can be identified as German. It's just horrible, very horrible. Thankfully they talk English with each other most of the time. Did i mention that it's very horrible German?
- Helps it's such terrible German that at one point when Alan Gruber whispers "Shiess das Fenster!" the Mook replies with "Was?" several times until Gruber says it in (accented) English, which the Mook understands.
  - Oh, SHIESS das Fenster! I thought you meant Scheiss das Fenster!
K911 features a dog "trained in Holland". The commands given to the creature, however, are Dutch that's so badly mangled that a native speaker of Dutch wouldn't even be aware of his language being spoken until it's pointed out.
- Apparently, 'movie German' is closer to Dutch than 'movie Dutch'.
- Most police dogs in America use German as the language of command, cuts down on perps, onlookers etc confusing them. I suspect it's a very abreivriated form of the language.
In Mission Impossible, the intentionally incorrect pseudo-Slavic that appears over and over which sounds (and looks) just English enough to be followed accurately by an English-speaking audience. Behind the scenes it was known as Gellerese (from MI producer Bruce Geller).
In Team America World Police, anything that wasn't English was nonsensical gibberish, apart from random French that amounted to the same thing. The terrorists, for example, only use 3 words: 'Durkadurka', 'Muhammed', and 'Jihad!' Except for the cries of "NO ME GUSTAAAA!" at the Panama canal.
- This seems to have been done explicitly to parody the foaming-at-the-mouth nationalistic American stereotype that considers every other language but English to be gibberish.
  - Or maybe it was all about the fact that "Muhammad", "Jihad", and "Allah" are the only words of Arabic that are well-known to native speakers of English. Or maybe it has no deeper significance and was just there for teh lulz.
  - Considering the people who made the movie, its likely all of the above.
Sacha Baron Cohen takes full advantage of this trope in his Borat sketches and movie; his spoken "Kazakh" is actually a (sometimes, but not always, nonsensical) mix of Hebrew, Yiddish, Polish, and other languages (mostly the first) in an overdone Slavic accent. His written notes are in straight Hebrew.
- Unlike most of the examples on this page, the Hebrew he is speaking is understandable, therefore most of "Kazakh" is understandable too. However, it is very poor Hebrew and mostly grammatically incorrect (think gangsta speech). Also his sidekick in the film, Azamat, is actually speaking real Armenian (I can't understand it, unlike the Hebrew, I just read this on The Other Wiki). I bet most people who saw him assumed it was all gibberish.
  - I can. It's really Armenian.
Subversion: In The Court Jester the English Hubert Hawkins (Danny Kaye) pretends to be a jester from Italy. When a guard asks him why he doesn't have an accent, he replies that he is fluent in many languages and demonstrates it by talking a lot of nonsensical gibberish that sounds very much like French, Italian and German. (This skill was then known as "double-talk", and Kaye was a famous master of it.) The guard, who doesn't understand any of this, allows him to pass.
The Spanish movie Bienvenido Mr Marshall has a whole segment parodying The Western movies in faux-English except a few words like "Whiskey", "Hey!" "Howdoyoudo?"
In Top Secret!, most of the German spoken is completely irrelevant Yiddish phrases. For example, when supposedly ordering at a restaurant, the love interest is in fact telling the waiter, "Folg' mich a gang und gai in drerd" — "Do me a favor and drop dead." At one point a German soldier does respond to an order in German, severely intoning not "Jawohl, mein Fuehrer" but "Ich liebe dich, mein Schatze" — "I love you, darling." (OK, it's not set in the Third Reich, but still ridiculous.) More fake languages abound: the Swedish lines are English run backwards, and a priest reciting the last rites for a condemned man speaks mostly in stock Latin phrases, throwing in one sentence in Pig Latin ("ou're-yay oing-gay to get ied-fray in the air-chay").
In The Bourne Identity, the name on Bourne's Russian passport is written "Foma Kiniaev" in Latin letters and "Aschf Lshtshfum" (Ащьф Лштшфум) in Cyrillic letters. Apparently, the designers of the prop just typed the name in the Russian keyboard layout without actually translating it. The name was corrected in The Bourne Supremacy.
- Almost all the Cyrillic writing in "Borat" was written the same way. If you type the words in the subs in English, with Russian keyboard settings, it will come out like the text in the film (utter nonsense...)
The Princess Diaries and The Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement play this trope straight over a cliff by inventing a European country, "Genovia," in which the queen (Julie Andrews) is English, the peasants speak either French or English with French, English, and American accents, and the princess's name is Princess Amelia Mignonette Thermopolis Renaldi. What's that supposed to be, English? French? Greek? Italian? Who cares - it sounds foreign.
- Except for the peasants, this is more or less correct. The queeen should speak perfect English, since European royals are expected to be fluent in several languages, and mistakes are fodder for the boulevard press. Also, family names often come from another language then the language spoken in the country, for example the Swedish Bernadottes. Amelia (fashionable in the 18th century) is a common name for European princesses.
- The books do give some explanation — for some reason it's a Francophone country which used to be part of Italy. And the Amelia and Thermopolis parts come from her (American) mother. And no accents, obviously.
The execrable Wild World Of Batwoman (given a sound thrashing by the guys on MST3K) had the main characters' seance frequently interrupted by a Chinese spirit. Keep in mind, the spirit's Chinese mainly consisted of saying "ching", "chang" and "chong" over and over again in random combinations, causing Crow to deadpan "You know, that may not be real Chinese." As Mike says, "To every Asian and every human being, we apologize for that last scene."
In Blazing Saddles, the Indian Chief (played by Mel Brooks) speaks Yiddish. This was done on purpose, as the movie is a parody anyway.
- Averted with the German words spoken by Sheriff Bart and Lili Von Shtüpp, which make sense.
Occasionally happens in reverse: When something has to sound like an incomprehensible language (Alien speech, say) sometimes a real one will be used with funny results. In one movie about prehistory, cavemen started discussing something about tea in perfect modern Russian.
Alien language examples abound in Star Wars: Return of the Jedi. Lando's copilot Nien Nunb speaks Haya, a dialect from Kenya. The Ewoks speak a mix of Tibetan, Nepalese and other Mongolian languages. Greedo and Jabba also spoke a mix of Earth languages.
- Reportedly, when the movie was shown in the part of Kenya where the actor playing Nien Nunb was from, the entire theater cracked up at his one line. This is when the charity showing it, and then later the entire cast/production team learned that what he had said was, "One thousand herds of elephants are standing on my foot!" All George Lucas had told him to do was "say something that sounds alien."
- Huttese as spoken by Greedo and Jabba is basically bad Quechua. The two also spoke different dialects, so the former obviously has ejective consonants in his speech while the latter's sounds much more English-like.
- The Tattooinian dialect used in Episode I is a whole lot like Spanish (perhaps Portuguese), except incomprehensible.
Possible subversion: Apparently those Westerns which cast Native Americans in speaking roles told them to speak their own language to add some authenticity, which would either be subtitled or translated by another character. The actors complied, but said whatever they felt like, often saying obscene or insulting things about the director, the other actors, etc. While this troper is unable to find written evidence to support this, his father told him stories of Native American audiences inexplicably cracking up laughing during scenes that were meant to be dramatic.
Trey Parker's college film Cannibal! The Musical is a film set in Colorado in 1883. At one point, they come across some "Nihonjin" Indians who are clearly Japanese and speaking in said language. Of course, this was done on purpose and lampshaded at the same time, by the name of their "tribe" ("Nihonjin" literally means "Japanese person/people") and with one of them assuring the protagonists they really were Indians.
Indian Chief: You don't believe we are Indians?
Shannon Bell: No, all-
Indian Chief: We have teepees!
- Hell, one of the teepees has the Japanese flag on it, and the Chief is CLEARLY armed with a katana!
Movies made during World War Two that took place in the Pacific Theater usually had Koreans and Chinese as stand-ins for the Japanese. They were told to say phrases like 'I tie your shoe, you tie my shoe' faster than normal to sound like they were speaking Japanese. Note that this was much more common during the war, when actual Japanese people were ~~in internment camps~~ unavailable.
- Parodied by Terry Pratchett in Interesting Times with the Agatean battle cry: "Orrrrr! Itiyorshu! Yutimishu!"
In the Blade films, Esperanto is used for the street signs and posters in "foreign" cities to make the locale seem "generically European".
- Direct references to Esperanto include a scene with Kris Kristofferson buying a newspaper (according to the DVD, Kristofferson claims he studied the language seriously as to not offend its native speakers!) as well as footage from the then newly discovered 'lost' horror film Incubus (one of two filmed entirely in Esperanto, also noteworthy for starring William Shatner pre-Star Trek) in the scene where Hannibal King is resting after being stabbed by Drake.
The Libyan terrorists from Back To The Future speak some vaguely Arabic-sounding nonsense language.
In Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Willie Scott sings Cole Porter's "Anything Goes" in what is apparently some made-up version of Chinese.
- This trope is averted for Mola Ram, who speaks flawless Hindi and whose lines make perfect sense in the context of the plot. On the other hand, he is played by a Bollywood actor who probably did his own translation.
- However, whenever an extra speaks it's Sinhalese. This is because the Indian government didn't allow them to shoot such an inaccurate portrayal of Indian culture in the country, so the production moved to Sri Lanka.
More WWII horrors: The "Japanese" villain in the 1940s Batman serial is named Tito Daka. Except the ti sound does not exist in Japanese phonetics (the closest is "ち/チ", usually romanized as chi). That, combined with some pronunciations that grate on the ears of someone with only two semesters of Japanese mean that even Batman himself couldn't make the series watchable after the first episode.
- ティ?
  - Only loanwords use that kana combination. Native Japanese words only use the aforementioned "chi."
- What about Little Tokyo becoming a "ghost street" when "a wise government rounded up the shifty-eyed Japs"? In fairness, the serial gets better (never good, but better), but This Troper can't say for sure whether it's because the overt racism becomes less painful or you just become vaccinated against it.
Skewered in Maverick, as, when the heroes are set upon by a band of Indians, Bret Maverick "translates" the chief's words, informing the rest of the party that they have trespassed on sacred ground, and the Indians' gods demand a blood sacrifice. As Maverick well knows (and the subtitles tell the audience), however, the chief just wants to know if Maverick has come for the money he owes him.
In one children's movie, the young English protagonists found themselves in New Zealand watching Maori 'savages' dancing around a fire whilst chanting "Tahi! Rua! Toru! Wha!" repeatedly. As any New Zealand schoolchild should be able to tell you this actually is genuine te reo Maori (Maori language). It translates to "One! Two! Three! Four!".
Parodied in Scary Movie 4 with two characters having an subtitled conversation consisting only of Japanese trademarks.
Played painfully straight in the third Austin Powers movie in which Goldmember, and everyone else goes on at some length about Goldmember being Dutch, only for Goldmember to only ever use really bad German in the movie. Come on Hollywood, it isn't that hard.
- There are also the twins Fook Mi and Fook Yu, whom Austin identifies as Japanese, but their names could much more easily pass for Vietnamese, Korean, or some other East or Southeast Asian language. Of course, the entire franchise is made of Rule Of Funny.
- Well, Fukumi is a real Japanese name.
  - In a deleted scene, Austin meets the twins again (in Japan), and they reveal their real names: Cindy and Sally. So Yeah.
Million Dollar Baby makes a mess of the tiny amount of Irish it attempts to use; Mo chuisle ("my vein," or loosely "my darling") is misspelled "mo cuishle" and mispronounced as "muh kwushla"; it should be "muh khushleh". Also, Clint Eastwood's character claims to be translating WB Yeats' poetry from Irish into English, but Yeats had only basic Irish and never wrote any Irish poetry.
The Italian 1970 western Compañeros had a main character that was supposed to be Swedish and was named "Yodlaf Peterson". Yodlaf is total gibberish and does not even remotely sound like any Swedish or Scandinavian names (the closest real name probably being "Jonas") and while Petersson and Pettersson are common surnames in Sweden, Swedish surnames ending with -son almost always have two S's (as in "Peter's Son" contrived to Petersson). The surname would probably be excusable since occasionally people prefer to have their surnames written with only one S for aesthetic reasons, but the film does this more than once, also introducing an (fictional) brand of Swedish Safes named Svenson. The film also contains some Swedish speech, which was done surprisingly well - while badly pronounced all the lines where grammatically correct.
In The Terminal with Tom Hanks, he is from a made-up Warsaw Pact country during the fall of the USSR, and he speaks passable Bulgarian, adequate to the situation.
According to legend the Zulu messenger in Zulu was instructed to simply 'say something' in his native language as he collapsed as King Cetewayo's feet. This was a mistake as what he chose to say was 'kiss my behind' or words to that effect. The Zulu actor playing the king managed to keep a straight face. But audiences of their compatriots didn't.
In Charlie's Angels, there's a scene where the angels speak Finnish to each other. They discuss what a bad idea it would be to sleep with a client, but this is not what it says in the subtitles. I'm guessing the scene was rewritten after it was shot. Things get increasingly weird if you watch the movie with Finnish subtitles, which also don't match what's said.
Averted in ''Three Amigos!, whose Mexican characters speak Spanish correctly.
Kal Penn has said that when filming the scene where Taj loses his virginity in *Van Wilder*, the filmmakers told him to "say something in Hindoo [sic] — something religious." Instead, he said in Gujurati: "There's a white bitch under me."
While Uma Thurman certainly tries to speak Swedish in The Producers it fails to the point of her lines having to be subtitled on Swedish releases. This troper and her friends didn't even get that she was saying actual Swedish words until we rewatched it a couple of times. The whole thing is a bit odd since they managed to get some stuff right and some stuff plain odd. Like her "catchphrase", "God dag min vännen", which translates into "hello my the friend".
- The Swedes do sometimes use that double article, but it usually requires an adjective of some sort before the noun. So it's easy to see why they might make that mistake...
In the film The Incredible Hulk, the thuggish Brazilian who harasses Bruce Banner in the early scenes speaks Portuguese with a horrible, horrible foreign accent. It's gramatically correct (or correctly incorrect for the setting), though.
In Stripes, the Soviet soldiers of Czechoslovakia all speak with vaguely Russian-sounding grunts.

Close Film

The original Dune novel contains a verse in Gratuitous Russian, which Frank Herbert obviously constructed by picking up the most pleasant-sounding words without regard for the subtle differences in meaning. When it was translated into Russian properly (as opposed to the original, absolutely horrid "purple Dune" translation that had at least a few mistakes on every page), the translator had to translate the verse into Hindustani so it wouldn't sound so silly.
- Could you quote the verse? Try as I might, I couldn't find a verse in Russian. There was a verse in Serbian, though, another Slavic language that might sound like Gratuitous Russian to someone who Did Not Do Their Research.
- In a strange example, "Hindustani" is a word used by native Indians to refer to themselves (for example, the title of a popular song: "Phir Bhi Dil Hai Hindustani", roughly translates to "At heart we are still Indians") and using it to describe a language is rather like referring to English as "Germanic", as Hindustani as a language covers Hindi, Urdu, and a wide variety of regional dialects. However, it is often confused with Hindu (one who follows Hinduism) and Hindi (one of India's 22 official languages, all of which are both Hindustani and Hindustani) and the three are often used interchangeably.
  - As long as it sounds foreign.
Nanny Ogg of the Discworld novels usually manages to make herself understood no matter where she goes, although her linguistic approach is described as "gabbling away in her own personal Esperanto". "Excuse me, young homme! Trois beers avec us, silver plate."
- A straight example in The Colour of Magic, where Rincewind's identity in our world is a Swedish scientist named "Dr. Rjinswand", which is nothing like a Swedish name. (In the Swedish translation, his nationality is changed to Dutch.) Twoflower becomes a German tourist with the last name "Zweiblumen", which is correct, but translates to "Twoflowers" (a straight translation of his name would be "Zweiblume").
In Tales Of MU, the Yokai Girls from Japan-like "Yokan" fall into this category, with names like "Maliko" that almost sound Japanese but not quite. However, a recently revealed bit of plot indicates that all Yokano names are originally Japanese-derived but that there is a story-related reason why all 4 of the characters introduced from that region have "jarringly" un-Japanese nicknames.
In The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, an alien from Betelgeuse with an initially poor grasp of English decides that a nicely bland and inconspicuous name to adopt would be Ford Prefect.
- In some versions, it's explained that this was because he mistook the dominant species.
Harry Dresden, of The Dresden Files uses mostly fake and/or ungrammatical Latin for magic words. This is explained as a sort of emotional boundary from the spells, and it's noted that, when working spells, the important bit is not so much the words themselves, but rather that the words sound right to the individual using the spell. (It's also established in one of the novels that Harry's grasp of actual Latin, used instead of English in meetings of the White Council of wizards, is terrible. As he repeatedly says, "Damn correspondence course.")
- In another book, he mentions that a female wizard he grows up with prefers using pseudo-Egyptian in her spells.
- It's likely that this is intended as a joke in a very Genre Savvy series, since the author clearly knows proper Latin.
- It isn't exactly a joke; the words themselves don't matter to the spell itself, but they are the way a wizard's mind relates itself to magic. Thus, every wizard uses some kind of fake, foreign-sounding nonsense-words for spells, in order to avoid shooting magic around by accident when simply speaking normally. In other words, if Harry's spells were in proper Latin, he'd run the risk of triggering them while speaking Latin to other wizards. (That is, assuming his real Latin wasn't so horrific.)
Le Chef-du-pomt-du-pomt
In Daniel Pinkwater's Alan Mendelsohn, Boy from Mars, Samuel Klugarsh responds to the protagonists' skepticism by stating that he knows way more than they do: "Waka waka. Needle noddle noo. Hoop waka dup dup. Baklava. That's Turkish." Actually, that's one Turkish word ("baklava") among a whole lot of nonsense.
The French policeman in Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code is named Bezu Fache. While Fache is a real French name, the first name Bezu comes out to most French people as a. unheard of - there is not one Bezu X in the Paris phonebook, and b. hilarious, as the name evokes André Bézu, a "comic" singer from the eighties, mostly known for the very corny tune La Queuleuleu. Making things worse, Bézu - the singer - usually doned a caricatural French attire complete with a beret and a blue, red, and white bowtie, perhaps making Dan Brown's choice of a name an elaborate joke on cliches about France - or not.
- Aringarosa is not a Spanish name either. It means Pinkherring in Italian.
Hannibal Lecter is eventually given a Dead Little Sister named Mischa, which is ordinarily a masculine name roughly analogous to "Michael". (However, as the website hannotations.com explains, this may be deliberate due to various symbolic elements in the name.) This is one of the many reasons why among fans of The Silence Of The Lambs, Hannibal is often excluded from canon.
In H.P. Lovecraft's fiction the Necronomicon was penned by an Arab named Abdul Alhazred, a fictitious name Lovecraft came up with in his childhood. The name "Alhazred" doesn't exist in Arabic and couldn't exist given that "Abdul" ends with a suffix synonymous with the prefix of "Alhazred", so if the name were real then it would be something like "abd-el-Hazred".
In Twilight, the name of the Quileute chief in the legend about "the cold ones" is Kahela. Kahela was the name of a semi-legendary Hawaiian chief.
In Lazarillo de Tormes, the seller of indulgences speaks in faux-Latin around people who won't know better, in order to win their trust.
Stephen King's novel, Thinner contains passages supposedly in the Romani language. In fact, they're in Swedish, and mostly gibberish.

Close Literature

The Special Act of Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon has Ami speaking in some kind of pseudo-English. (Previous episodes had real English when required, however.)
The classic example is Latka Gravas, played by Andy Kaufman in Taxi. Carol Kane has said in interviews that, when she was hired to play Latka's girlfriend Simka, Andy had to teach her how to "speak" his gibberish language so that the two actors could make it appear that both characters were speaking the same language.
In a Monty Python's Flying Circus sketch, a joke so funny anyone who hears it dies laughing is rendered in mock German ("Wenn ist das Nunstück git und Slotermeyer?") Also, the apparently offensive Hungarian phrase mistranslating "This will cost you six shillings" in the phrasebook sketch is "Yandelvayasna grldenwi stravenka," which doesn't even sound like Hungarian.
- My hovercraft is full of eels.
  - My nipples explode in delight!
- Then there's the Cycling Tour episode, where we get a Soviet General saying things like this: "Shi musks di seensand dravenka oblomov Engleska Solzhenitzhin." One of the Pythons seems to have remembered his Goncharov.
- For the record, the full translation was "Wenn ist das Nunstück git und Slotermeyer? Ja, ober der beierhund und flipperwald gersput" which is nonsense, but several of the words are actually german. Translated, the joke is: "If is the nun piece git and slotermeyer? Yes, sputted over the meadow-dog and flipper-forest". Try not to laugh yourself to death.
  - Possibly justified, as the translation was done one word at a time for safety (one translator accidentally saw two words, and had to be hospitalised for a week). Then again, the German soldiers actually do die laughing, so I don't know...
In an episode of Friends, Phoebe dates a prince from an unidentified (although presumably European) nation. Throughout the episode, the prince and his translator converse in total nonsense.
- Played with in another episode when Phoebe tries to teach Joey French. While Phoebe can and does speak French (Lisa Kudrow's husband is French, which is probably where the plot idea started), Joey speaks gibberish like "Je de plee bloom"; he can't tell the difference between the gibberish and real French. Ironically, Matt LeBlanc is himself a fluent French speaker (the clue is in the name).
The Swedish Chef of The Muppet Show and other Muppet-based features speaks gibberish which mirrors vocal inflection in Swedish but nothing else. In one episode, Beverly Sills and the Chef conversed fluently in what she explicitly identified as "mock Swedish."
- I think this was actually Jean Stapleton, star of All In The Family. The abashed Swedish Chef reverts to his 'native tongue,' at which point Stapleton throws her hands up and admits she doesn't speak 'mock Japanese.'
- Whatever it is the Swedish Chef speaks, Björn Borg clearly does too. Fluently.
- The Muppet Show also featured occasional appearances by the Flying Zucchini Brothers, an acrobat troupe that spoke Italian-sounding gibberish with the occasional broken English inserted. ("Ay, Fettucini alfredo! Light-a da booma-booma!")
  - In one sketch, Danny Kaye (see above) played the Chef's uncle.
Lt. Hikaru Sulu from Star Trek The Original Series combines a Japanese given name with a completely made-up surname that kind of sounds Japanese (the fact that it's got an L in it notwithstanding).
- The Sulu Strait is in the Philippine archipelago. The Japanese dub of the original series considered Sulu to be Filipino.
- Gene Roddenberry mentioned it being an affectionate rendering of Solow, as in Herb Solow, the executive who helped get Star Trek off the ground, "without the W."
- The ''StarTrek'' wiki says that the name "Sulu" comes from the Sulu Sea; I also vaguely remember a making-of special that also said the same, elaborating that Sulu was chosen because of the sea's proximity to many Asian regions, and only after they had finalized the name did the production team find out that it wasn't a real name.
- Sulu's character is Asian-American. He was born in San Francisco, according to The Voyage Home.
  - According to The Making of Star Trek, Sulu was meant to be "of mixed Oriental and Filipino background," not purely Japanese, so the surname is not an error. Either that or the book used this as a retcon for the name.
  - Wait, Filipinos don't count as "Orientals"? Isn't that like saying "mixed South American and Paraguayan background"?
- On the other hand, in the Japanese dubbing of Star Trek, Sulu was renamed Kato, a common Japanese surname.
- Also partially subverted in the later shows, where a new language was invented for the Klingons, complete with full grammar rules and syntax (in fact, it is a "real" enough language to have many speakers and have books written in it). This allows them to speak a non-human language without having to resort to the usual tricks.
- Ironically though, writers of Deep Space Nine or Star Trek Voyager often didn't have the time or inclination to work out the proper Klingon translation, simply looking up the words and using them in a grammatically incorrect manner.
- No kidding. Marc Okrand put a lot of effort into creating a coherant language given the preexisting words, yet the TV show still mangle the language, forcing retcon after retcon and Holy Wars between sects of Klingon language speakers.
  - Riker in TNG pronounces it so badly as to De-Subvert the trope again.
- The name "Khan Noonien Singh" is freakin' made of this. "Singh" is a Sikh name, but not a surname. "Khan" is a Central Asian title, but it's treated as though it were his first name. Khan is identified as a Sikh even though Sikhs don't shave their beards and Khan is always clean-shaven. And he has a Mexican accent.
  - What? Singh is a quite common Indian surname, carried by lots of people who are not Sikh. A Singh I know claimed it is as common as "Smith"...
  - Also, Khan believed him and his men to be far superior to regular humans. Odds are he didn't care about the culture and just didn't want any facial hair.
Parodied in Angel. A Mexican wrestler, who goes by the name of Numero Cinco, explains that he got that name from an earlier time in his life, when he and his brothers called themselves "Los Hermanos Numeros." Angel's reaction to this name: "The Number Brothers? Huh?"
Averted in many series broadcast by Australia's SBS like Pizza, thanks to the massive translation facilities that network has. It's funny knowing that Pizza puts more effort into its foreign dialogue than its (tongue-in-cheek low quality) special effects.
An odd version appeared on Emergency! from time to time. Firefighter Marco Lopez (played by Marco Lopez) would sometimes be called upon to translate for a Spanish-speaking victim or witness. However, for some inexplicable reason, some of these conversations consisted of nothing but meaningless babbling between Lopez and the extra, even if the extra obviously could speak Spanish.
The American Whose Line Is It Anyway? featured a game called "Foreign Film Dub", in which the language was specified by the audience. Two of the actors would pretend to be in a movie made in a language other than English (French, Japanese, etc.), speaking nonsense words meant to sound like that language, while the other two actors would improvise humorous English "translations" of their gibberish. On at least one occasion the language was Klingon. On another occasion, the language was Canadian.
On the topical news quiz Have I Got News For You, Paul Merton felt that the trick to speaking French was 'all in the shoulders', probably referring to a French stereotype of shrugging while speaking.
According to this troper's Korean-born mother, whenever Korean was meant to be spoken in M*A*S*H, Japanese was used instead. Apparently it was easier to find actors who knew Japanese than Korean.
- Not that surprising, considering that three of the most often recurring characters were played by Noriyuki "Pat" Morita (Japanese-American), Mako (Japanese) and Rosalind Chao (Chinese-American).
Gustavo, a smug European elitist who makes occasional appearances on Late Night with Conan O'Brien, is a shining example of this trope ("They're not shoes! They're flexifussen!"). This is played with by having him continuously refuse to name which country he's from.
Subverted in My Name Is Earl, where Catalina occasionally speaks in Spanish, implying to the non-Spanish speaking characters that she is insulting them. My Cuban wife is amused that she is actually saying things like "Thank you to our Spanish speaking audience, as I understand how difficult it is to learn a foreign language like English, and we appreciate your loyalty to our show".
The X-Files clearly tried with the episode "Død Kalm." The Norwegian spoken is atrocious when it comes to pronunciation, and filled with grammatical errors and archaic words, but the general meaning can be identified with patience. For the title, however, they failed twice, first by attempting to translate an idiom directly, and then failing to do that by using a word that doesn't actually exist.
- They rendered "Go to Hell!" as "Walk to Hell!", and used painfully stilted school-Oslo Norwegian... in the far North. Giving it much the same effect as seeing two "Texans" converse in broken British English. The fact that they placed the mysterious evil spot in the middle of Norway's most heavily trafficked tourist sea lane, though...
In the episode "Selfless" of Buffy the Vampire Slayer there is a sequence that takes place in Viking-age Scandinavia somewhere, with the extras speaking gibberish and the two main characters speaking completely incomprehensible Swedish. According to the behind the scenes on the DVD they had been told not to worry, and just say Norse-sounding things, but then the actors went and actually learned their lines in Swedish, so they used it. The pronounciation is, however, so terrible that a Swedish person doesn't even recognise they are speaking Swedish, and can't understand it even if they try.
- The episode Passion also gives the psuedo Latin phrase "Formatia trans sicere educatorum" as the school motto.
  - And yet one episode has a spell in real Sumerian. Sumerian! A 3-millennia-dead linguistic isolate!
The Flight of the Conchords play a song "Foux Du Fafa" that consist only of beginner French phrases in the "Girlfriends" episode.
The Kids In The Hall had a game show called Feelyat! presented entirely in ludicrous fake Dutch, complete with Der Nederlander Footchoir (a bunch of people hiding behind a curtain except for their hands, which were dressed with socks and wooden shoes, clomping rhythmically).
CSI is guilty of that in all incarnations. All too often, the Chinese people spoke Korean, the Japanese Korean, and when finally Korean people came up they spoke Chinese!
- On the other side, most TV-crime shows have often Korean characters (especially concerning gang wars with black gangs) but aren't capable of getting people who actually know some Korean.
The Fast Show's "Channel 9" sketch, inspired by baffling Central European televison, has monologues like "Et-eth-etth-thethet-Chris Waddle." (A British footballer, chosen for no good reason.) It started out as a news broadcast, and expanded into adverts, dramas and a nativity play ("SPROG!").
- The lottery skit - where the "random" numbers were clearly visible before being light up, and the sequence went something like: 9 - Tosis, 20 - Myxama, 29 - Myxama-Tosis. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myxamatosis
- "Scorchio!" Brrrr.
A visual example of this appears on Korean television on variety programmes when a foreign person is speaking in their native language and the network doesn't think the words are important enough to translate. The foreign speakers are usually subtitled with something like "!@%$$#@%*&
In the original Land Of The Lost, the Kroffts were actually ordered by the network not to do this for the Pakuni. So they hired Victoria Fromkin, a Ph.D. linguist out of UCLA, to create the Pakuni language: A grammar, a syntax, and a two hundred word vocabulary. The language is fully detailed in the DVD extras for season 1.
Totally parodied on the (British) comedy 'Allo 'Allo!. A German spy, attempting to infiltrate Britain, is asked to demonstrate his supposedly realistic English accent. It comes out as something to the effect of "Fafafafafa, fafafafafafa, Big Ben".
This Troper understands that despite the best efforts of the cast the ~~'Chinese'~~ Mandarin in Firefly and Serenity was execrable.
- This Troper always thought that the poorly pronounced Mandarin had an in-universe explanation, namely that it was a second language, albeit a commonly known one (like Spanish in the US), and poor pronunciation was to be expected. The Mandarin spoken "officially," such as in the warning chimes in "Out of Gas" sounded perfect to me...
Averted in, of all places, Baywatch in an episode which featured a Dutch 'saved girl of the week' who not only spoke in clearly understandable if slightly accented Dutch, but whose dialogue was also directly contextually appropriate to the plot. This troper was pleasantly surprised as the Dutch don't get much representation on American TV.
The Prisoner episode "The Chimes of Big Ben" introduces an allegedly Estonian Soviet Agent called Nadia Rakowski. Rakowski is a Polish name, Nadia a name used by many cultures, but neither by Estonians nor by Russians - the Russian version of this name is "Nadezhda".
- The actress also speaks with a thick, Slavic accent. Estonian is a Finno-Ugric language, closely related to Finnish, but not related to Russian at all.
Wild Wild West. A director once asked some Native American extras to use their own language for a scene, but decided not to use it as they didn't sound 'Indian' enough.
Both played straight and averted in the 1990s Get Smart revival series. Agent 66 disguises herself as a Swede named Dr. Heynadeggjadeggi - not a remotely Swedish last name. Then averted as both she and another doctor speak grammatically correct Swedish.
Sid Caesar, Howard Morris, and Carl Reiner frequently did sketches for Your Show of Shows in a fake European-sounding gibberish.

Close Live Action TV

The Beatles song "Sun King" contains three lines of Italian/Spanish-sounding nonsense (which people will nevertheless insist is actual Italian or Spanish). It includes a fair number of kind-of-in-jokes; for instance, what sounds like Italian is in fact "chicka ferdy," which is playground Scouse for "na na na na-na!"
Dream Theater's "Take The Time" has Gratuitous Italian, and although the Italian is correct (sampled from a movie), the rendition of it in the lyrics booklet is horribly mangled.
The 2000 epic movie Gladiator's ending theme, titled "Now We Are Free", has lyrics that many claim to be either Latin/Hebrew/Arabic/German/Old Irish. The singer, Lisa Gerrard, points out in her website that the lyrics are from the language of the heart, a personal language she made up when she was 11 (heard also in some her songs with Dead Can Dance, fact fans). That doesn't stop people from arguing about it, though.
Some of Yuki Kajiura's music, such as "A Song of Storm and Fire" from Tsubasa Chronicles, have lyrics that sound like a real language, but mean absolutely nothing.
- That's Kajiuran, an invented language that sounds just similar enough to Italian to be confusing.
Chicago's song "Saturday in the Park" refers to "A man selling ice cream/Singing Italian songs," followed by an improvised and incomprehensible line in pseudo-Italian.
Nellie McKay's "Lali Est Paresseux" has accurate but largely nonsensical French lyrics.
Boney M.'s "Rasputin", though about a Russian figure, throws in some German words: "...the kasatschok he danced really wunderbar". Partly excused by the fact that Boney M. was formed by a German.
"Spanish Bombs" by the Clash has a refrain which is supposed to be Spanish but is not actually a complete, comprehensible phrase.
- To a casual listener, in fact, the background lyrics of "Should I Stay Or Should I Go" barely even qualify as gibberish as sung.
Lemon Demon's "Hyakugojyuuichi 2003" has a whole verse of Mark "Toxic" Hughes talking pseudo-Japanese gibberish in the style of the announcer from Pokemon Image Song "Pokemon Ieru Ka Na?" (also known as "the Japanese Poke-Rap"). This was so the gibberish could be Mondegreened into dadaist lyrics in the Animutation style for the flash cartoon made of the song.
Coraline's soundtrack has some random made up language for at least one song.
Madonna's Greatest Hits Volume 2 album has "モヂジラミミヂ" written on the packaging. Those katakana spell "mojijiramimiji". This means nothing in Japanese; however, it is what one gets when one types "MADONNA" on a Japanese keyboard set to kana mode...
Soundtracks by Japanese composer Yoko Kanno (including those of Wolf's Rain, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, and Cowboy Bebop) regularly feature an enigmatic singer named Gabriela Robin (commonly believed to be Kanno herself) who sometimes sings in an apparently nonsense language that sounds (to This Troper, at least) like an Alternate Universe version of French with some aspects of Russian mixed in. The effect is brilliantly haunting.
The Twelfth Man's comedy albums are practically built on this trope with the foreign players names.
The rock group Blondie is notorious in certain circles for gratuitious French lyrics that, while not exactly gibberish, tend to be painfully literal and non-idiomatic translations from English. To a fluent speaker, the French verse of "Sunday Girl" in particular is little more than a Dick And Jane level translation of one of the English verses; other songs are almost as bad, and "Call Me" throws in random stings of gratuitous Spanish as well.
Brutally averted on Manowar's "Thunder in the Sky" EP, which features sixteen versions of the song Father, each sung (correctly) in a different language
Rock of Ages by Def Leppard starts out with a German nonsense phrase "Gunter glieben glauchen globen". This was later sampled by The Offspring for their song Pretty Fly (for a white guy).
Prisencolinensinainciusol, ~~all right~~ oll raigth! The lyrics are basically what the Italian singer thinks English sounds like.
Similarly, the opening from the Hellsing TV series, "The World Without Logos". Yeah, there are a few distinguishable English words in there, but most of that is just nonsense.
The song, Nazuki, by the Japanese rock band, Nightmare, features a chorus made of completely nonsensical gibberish that can be misheard as everything from Dutch to Portuguese to just really awful, phonetically-written English. (It's apparently just a language that was made up for the song.)

Close Music

Internet radio show 2 Sense tends to substitute foreign names the hosts can't pronounce with "Schleigelhoffen".
The Reduced Shakespeare Company's radio show included a purported Japanese film version of Hamlet by Akira Kurosawa, which included phrases like, "Ah, Subaru!" and "Sony tapeplayer!"

Close Radio

The plot of the first chapter in Pathfinder: Rise of the Runelords depends on a certain noble family: the Kaijitsus. And there was much wank.
Legend Of The Five Rings flirts with this. Major, canon NPCs will get well-based names, but the guidelines for players and Game Masters to name their own characters vary, and so do the accuracy of the names used by players.
- There was also Kurohito, a guy born with stark white hair and fair blue eyes, whose name means "Black Man" (Or So I Heard)
- Not the entire Otaku family, though?
- 7th Sea from the same RPG firm, set in a pseudo-Europe, is worse.
In Warhammer 40000, the Imperium has two main languages- Low Gothic, portrayed as English, and High Gothic, which is shown as (usually) hideously mangled pseudo-Latin. Examples abound, one of the non-mangled being the Chaos Titan Dies Irae (Wrath of God). Which actually means "Day of Wrath".
- This isn't an uncommon misuse of the phrase "Dies Irae", due to the apparent similarity of "Dies", meaning "day", and "Deus", meaning "god".

Close Tabletop Games

In the musical Of Thee I Sing, six French soldiers enter singing this French-sounding nonsense chorus (which slips in a Yiddish phrase in the fourth line):
Garçon, s'il vous plait,
Encore, Chevrolet Coupé;
Papah, pooh, pooh, pooh!
A vous toot dir veh, à vous?
"Miya sama" from Gilbert and Sullivan's Mikado is a subversion, as it is actually a Japanese folk song (though not a dirty one, as the urban legend has it). However, in one production the song was sung straight once, then repeated using lyrics made up entirely of Japanese brand names ("Mitsubishi Datsun Honda, Kawasaki Toyota...").
- Then there was the character named Yum-Yum, which is completely not a Japanese name..
- With the exception of the Mikado himself, all the characters' names are just vaguely Asian-sounding silliness.
Christmas Eve in Avenue Q chose that name when she moved to America because she thought it sounded good.

Close Theatre

Resident Evil 4 is set in a nameless fictional European country apparently set somewhere near Spain (but not in Spain itself, contrary to popular misconception). Despite this, all the Ganados speak Spanish with a Mexican accent.
Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney features a case with a defendant and witness who speak Borginese, a "language" which consists of dingbats.
- Netopian in Mega Man Battle Network is also written in dingbats, as is Melnics in Tales Of Eternia.
The creators of Ico, to facilitate the important gameplay/plot point of the two main characters being unable to verbally communicate or (in Yorda's case) be understood by the player, came up with not one, but two fictional languages for their protagonists. Yorda speaks something vaguely reminiscent of French, and Ico's language sounds a bit like Korean. The Queen speaks both tongues fluently, a talent she puts to good use in her little chats with Ico.
Jagged Alliance 2 is a notable exception. The demo has characters Gasket (a moron), and Ivan (a Russian with little patience). When Gasket displays his stupidity, Ivan finally says "I've never worked with such an idiot before" in perfect Russian, AND the game correctly displays what he said in text as well. Considering that excluding Ivan is the only exception to a game fully in English, it's impressive they took the effort to get it right.
- He speaks plenty of Russian during the entire (full) version of the game as well, with occasional "bouts" of broken English. Amusingly, whenever Russian is used, the English subtitles are followed by Russian subtitles which don't always match Ivan's speech.
- In the original Jagged Alliance Ivan only spoke Russian.
  - He was also subtitled only in Russian. The new Nintendo DS version of the game has his subtitles (unfortunately?) only in English.
- It should also be noted that Ivan is the not the only character who speaks his native language, although most foreigner characters (there are many, from different nationalities) simply use the customary Poirot Speak.
Bangai-o includes a man who only speaks in childish doodles of happy meadows and underwater scenes.
The entire soundtrack of the game Loco Roco is composed of happy singing in complete and utter nonsense that nonetheless sounds very much like a real language. If, you know, you don't listen to closely. This was done intentionally, so the lyrics "wouldn't have to be translated" for foreign audiences.
Beyond Good And Evil also features numerous songs in very convincing-sounding nonsense. Specifically, the nonsense is meant to sound "Belgian, with a little Spanish and English mixed in." However, there are songs with real Spanish and English words mixed in with the gibberish, as well as the game's pseudo-arc word, "Shauni."
- In spite of what many British and American tropers think, Belgian is not actually a language. Belgians speak Dutch, French and/or German.
- Many Belgian speakers of Dutch would prefer their specific variety to be referred to as "Flemish," even if the term suggests linguistic unity where there is considerable regional variation within Flanders itself. It's all a matter of cultural identity, possibly analogous to that of Scotland, England and Scottish English, with the added complication of a considerable francophone population at the other end of the country.
"Simlish", the language of the characters in The Sims and The Sims 2 is meant to be English foreign-sounding gibberish. Apparently the company that makes the games frequently receives calls from customers who think they've gotten the game in the wrong language.
- Didn't EA say that it's a mixture of Tagalog and Ukrainian?
- In Sims 3, at least, Simlish includes (correct, but irrelevant) phrases in French, Spanish and German. No doubt speakers of other languages would be able to pick out phrases in them as well. However, this troper now has to wonder if the French version includes English phrases in place of the French ones, for example.
Every Civ leader in Sid Meier's Civilization Revolution speaks in themed foreign sounding gibberish... Intentionally.
- The same thing happens for every governor in "Sid Meier's Pirates". Notably, it's the same nonsense phrases, just inflected differently for the various nationalities.
Drexl Roosh's Huttese speech in The Force Unleashed consisted mostly of gibberish, but this troper distinctly heard the word "risotto" (a type of Italian rice dish) buried somewhere in there. Not sure about the rest, though; presumably, it was mangled Quechua, like the Huttese from the movies.
Events of Half-Life 2 take place in an unspecified Eastern European location, so the game features quite a few inscriptions in Bulgarian.
- More specifically, one of lead designers was Bulgarian and modelled most of City 17 over Bulgaria's capital city. The square leaving the train station is an almost exact duplicate of a major plaza... Minus the Combine checkpoints. For a Bulgarian, it's actually a little creepy.
- Nevertheless, most in-game posters and signs featuring cyrillic letters are in fact in (sometimes mangled) Russian. Bulgarian usage of vowels is drastically different.
In the 1996 adventure game Call of Cthulhu: Prisoner of Ice a Norwegian character is introduced early in the game, but his lines are just barely comprehensible to Norwegian, Danish or Swedish speakers. In one scene he screams "I have never loved anybody" in horribly mispronounced Swedish (even though he is supposed to be Norwegian).
Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance and Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn has the Ancient Language, which the Herons use to sing their galdr. The language is just Japanese being reversed.
Maybe this is a common theme in Tom Clancy games, but in the air combat game HAWX, the game opens with the squad facing a set of Bolivarian insurgents named "Las Trinidad" attacking Brazil. The problem with that is that Las Trinidad does not mean "the trinity" (that's la trinidad), but Trinidad. As in Trinidad and Tobago.
The Panzer Dragoon series has the so-called "Panzerese," which is basically a combination of Japanese, German, English, and either Latin or Italian. Example: One song of the Panzer Dragoon Saga Soundtrack is called "Ecce Valde Glorious Ale." Make of that what you will. (does not qualify for Fictionary because it uses actual words from other languages)
Call of Duty 4 features Arabic graffiti in some levels, of varying accuracy. In one particularly amusing case, "Infinity Ward", the game's developer, is spelled out phonetically.
The Half-Japanese, Half-Russian male lead of the first two Shadow Hearts games had the Foreign Sounding Gibberish name "Urnmaf" or "Urmnaf"—depending on who you ask—in the original JP releases. For the US and EU releases, it was changed to Yuri, which is genuinely a name in both languages—although usually a girl's name in Japanese.
In one of the FIFA games (I forgot, which one) in the Russian team there was a player called... Petrof Gardinof. First, no Russian names end with "-of" (that's an outdated English/French transliteration), they (well, some of them) end with "-ov". Second, "Petrov" is not a forename, it's a surname; it means "Peter's son". Third, while Gardinov is a plausible name, it means "son of curtains", which just sounds pretty ridiculous. It goes without mention that Petrof Gardinof quickly became the true star of that game with this Russian troper and his friends.
The Legendof Zelda: Twilight Princess. Midna's spoken language sounds like some strange merge of Asian accent with French, while employing neither the grammar rules nor words of either language. We think it's gibberish, anyway.
Age Of Empires villager: "Roggan? Homus!"

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Irregular Webcomic has goofed on foreign languages a few times (such as in strip 30 where a German talks about his "bad plans for world domination" and uses the non-German phrase "with extreme prejudice"), to the point that David Morgan-Mar has started asking for help when he's doing them. To give him credit, he does admit it when he's goofed and he's stated his use of German articles is purely dictated by humour purposes.
Order Of The Stick features this trope as author Rich Burlew grabbed for Azure City characters Japanese-sounding words without really caring about what they meant, which is how we got a Daimyo named Lord Shojo (Lord Girly, in effect.) Not to mention a paladin(/samurai?) named O-Chul, which doesn't even sound Japanese (though may be Korean).
- A Chinese translation of Shojo's name might make perfect sense.
  - Or it could just mean orangutan (like the One Piece character).
- This gets a Lampshade Hanging and a Hand Wave pretty early on after meeting Miko. Roy asks about whether she should call her "Miko" or "Miyazaki", and she replies that she's never heard of Japan. It's the writer's way of saying, "This isn't the real world, so don't pick at the languages, culture, or names of the Azurites." See for yourself
  - There's also a Sangwaan. He's may be just making fun of the Fantasy Kitchen Sink nature of D&D's old "Oriental Adventures" setting.
Magellan: When creating an illusory world Maya needed some Russian sounding place names, Chang is quick to point this out.
The Spanish spoken by Something Positive 's Pepito intentionally read like English phrases were simply run through Babelfish, with nonsense words and Engrish thrown in at random. At first, everyone assumed it was just another one of Randy Mullholland's potshots at his Unpleasable Fanbase, but it turned out to also have plot-relevance as well. (Pepito was faking being English illiterate.)
The Inexplicable Adventures Of Bob pokes fun at this when two French waiters converse in mock French.

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Similarly to Looney Tunes, in ''Avatar The Abridged Series" Spanish is rendered mostly as English with "El" tacked on. "El Gasp!" Sometimes they also add "-o" to the end of words and maybe put in a real Spanish word in there.
- Avatar The Abridge Series "I challenge you to an Agni Kai!" "Don't you mean a duel?" "No, an Agni Kai!" "Why don't you just call it that then?" "Because it sounds Asian...ish?" (FYI, Agni is the Hindu god of fire, and Kai means meeting in Japanese)
As Long As It Looks Elvish...JRR Tolkien invented the tengwar script as a writing system for Middle-earth. The rules for writing in tengwar are complicated, and vary depending on where you are, when you are, and what language you're writing; one sign could stand for different sounds depending on the writing mode. So when people started making fonts to let them write tengwar on the computer, they usually mapped them to the keys in the tengwar's "grid"-formation. This is relatively easy to use, if you know what you're doing. Unfortunately, there are still people who don't know what they're doing who make fanart/fansites/whatever with little decorative bits of tengwar floating around, and who get the tengwar just by grabbing a font and typing things in literally. This leads to drawings of Elwe Singollo that are labeled, in beautiful and elegant Elvish lettering, "Febw Gywnghweehw".
Does de Puffincat count?
- "Puffincat have clever-smart-mind-concept!"

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Cartoon example: Mel Blanc's Looney Tunes renditions of such characters as African Witch Doctors and Aborigines are a classic case of pure gibberish that sounds correct, to an uncritical (and very un-PC) ear. In several wartime cartoons, "humorously" fractured German or Japanese is spouted by the villains and is basically the same thing. Also of note, most of the spoken and written "French" in the Pepe' Le Pew cartoons is undisguised English with "Le" tacked on front and an "e" on the end.
Bloo in Fosters Home For Imaginary Friends takes it to an extreme of sorts in the misleadingly titled episode "Foster's Goes to Europe". (For one thing... they don't actually get to go!)
Ling Ling in Drawn Together speaks vaguely Asian gibberish.
- According to "Drawn Together Babies", he speaks a language he made up with his dead twin. In another episode, Ling Ling undergoes an operation to speak English.
In the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon, Splinter often uses random Japanese words (and sometimes even obviously non-japanese words, like "Sacajawea") in his battle cries.
One of South Park's creators is fluent in Japanese, so all speech in Japanese is accurate. Other languages are just gibberish, though. Subverted in "Good Times With Weapons", where the lyrics of the Japanese theme song are a Bilingual Bonus - and a Take That to anyone who thinks that it's cool As Long As It Sounds Foreign.
- Also in South Park, 'Broflovski' is not a real Polish or Pole-Jewish surname, though this is probably intentional.
- The episode Osama Bin Laden Has Farty Pants features Afghan children who speak fluent, accurate Persian, albeit with Iranian accents, while Bin Laden and his followers speak random Muslim words mixed with foreign sounding gibberish.
  - The last time this troper checked, "Muslim" was not a language.
- In The Movie, Cartman sings Kyle's Mom's a Bitch in several languages, which seem to be Chinese, French, Dutch and an African language, judging from the backgrounds and costumes. It sounds nothing like those languages. Justified in that Cartman is giving his interpretation of what those languages would sound like.
- Also subverted in "Passion of the Jew" in which Cartman speaks correct German grammar.
The opening song from How the Grinch Stole Christmas includes several lines of Seussian gibberish. After it aired, the studio got dozens of letters from people wanting translations for the "Latin lyrics."
In one episode of The Replacements, Tasumi says her favorite thing about field trips is "No parents around to say things like 'Ichi ni san shi go!'" Okay, why would her parents be saying "One two three four five"?
- It's the combination to their luggage?
- Think about it. It's a play on words. Ichi ni san shi GO. As in,we should go.
- Ah, but real Japanese say "yon" for 4, because Four Is Death.
Hadji in Jonny Quest is supposedly a Hindu, but his name is a Muslim honorific for one who has made the pilgrimage to Mecca.
The Amazing Adrenili Brothers, who hail from "Réndøosîa" (a fiction Eastern European/Eurasian country) and speak in gibberish. (eg. "Groota Fizz", "Yazha" and "Jonka kriska navooti")
Of course, the time when Peter Griffin thinks he can speak Italian simply by virtue of his mustache applies to this trope. For those uninformed, it sounds a lot like "Bippidy babbito bobbiti bobbidi boo" with accompanying hand gestures. This Troper thought it was quite hilarious.
- The Italian butcher he's arguing with, however, is speaking proper Italian, although some of what he says does not make idiomatic sense. ("What's this? You're crazy! ... I will kill you with this meat!")
  - Which just means that that's exactly what Seth Mac Farlane wanted him to say. I mean, half the things anyone says makes no sense. This troper only wishes they'd dub the foreign languages as she doesn't know all of the ones Family Guy uses but have been informed they're always hilarious.
  - I think he confused Disney-Speak for Italian. That sounded like something out of Cinderella or something.
In Modern Toss, foul-mouthed signmaker Mr Tourette and his customers speak in a kind of gibberish that resembles French.
The Simpsons writers mangled the title of the episode "Burns verkaufen der Kraftwerk", which should be "Burns verkauft das Kraftwerk".

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Mirna Hindoyan became famous for her mangling of the English language in her appearances on The Amazing Race, such that her "version" of Spanish was called Mirnish.
In lingua Latina (or in the Latin language for you monoglots out there), hardly any words at all end in a long E, an "o" isn't masculine and "-orum" signifies possession. On the subject of those Sses-yeah, double letters are pronounced as both letters side by side, and they DID have obscenities and slang (whole book's worth, in fact.). Linguistic rant end.
- It's also a regular rule in the TWoP recaps that anyone who tries to stick an "o" on the end of an English word and trying to pass it off as Spanish is a douchebag.
Advertising example: Similarly to the above, Häagen-Dasz ice cream is famous for having chosen a name which sounds ~~Danish~~ ~~Hungarian~~ foreign no matter what your native language is, but doesn't mean anything.
- In a bizarre and funny legal case, Häagen-Dasz tried to sue another American Ice Cream brand, Frusen Gladje (which is almost entirely correct Swedish for frozen joy), because the name was intended to fool consumers into thinking the ice cream was actually made in Sweden. Häagen-Dasz lost because of the "clean hands"-doctrine - i.e., they were themselves equally guilty of using fake Scandinavian to sound old-timey and exotic, so couldn't blame others for using the same trick.
There's also Europanto, a "language" comprised of random words and syntax of various European languages, depending on what languages the speaker happens to know. A sample sentence: "Europanto want nicht informe aber amuse." It started as a journalist's joke, but now there are forums dedicated to its use.
In Dave Barry Does Japan, Barry notices that many signs and t-shirts in Japan feature English text. However, this text is usually completely meaningless, and people apparently just like the way it looks. He also notices that Japanese rock bands seem prone to choosing bizarre English names, with some very interesting results. One example: "King Fucker Chicken".
Despite what hundreds of books, movies and comics might tell you, Brazilians do not speak Spanish, nor have Spanish names. No, not even some of them. (They speak Portuguese, being originally a colony of Portugal.) This is such a widespread belief that it's become a standard trick question in many kinds of trivia games, including televised ones such as Jeopardy.
- Spanish and Portuguese names actually have significant overlap, so many Brazilians do have "Spanish names," or more precisely, Portuguese names that are also common in Spanish. And to complicate the issue, a minority of Hispanics have distinctly Portuguese (or Galician) last names.
One of the biggest reasons that some people have a backlash against anime and manga fans is due to the fact that, a good percentage of them, think adding "-umi" or "-aki" or "-oni" at the end of a bunch of garbled letters equals a Japanese name. Leading to character names like "Ojikuri Kanata" and "Remiko Kagura." Also, while "-san" is an actual Japanese term, there are rules for using it.
- Sadly, Remiko Kagura is fantastically authentic-sounding compared to some of the other examples doing the rounds out there. This troper's seen fan characters with names like Tsashi Chizuru, Aeashi Tomeoko and Heashmi Concaro before now. Because if it's got a lot of colliding vowels in it, it must be Japanese!
- Even when the names are made up of real kanji, they're often used wrong. Japanese names follow rules, children, and they're not actually hard to use (well, who gets a "maru" name used to be hard, and there were rules about whose names could incorporate titles, but both of those rules no longer exist).
Comedian Sid Caesar has gotten much mileage out of this technique. He shows it off on this guest appearance on the American Whose Line is it Anyway?
Many "Spanish" place names in the American Southwest are actually gibberish invented by Americans who wanted it to sound Spanish. For example, the name of Isla Vista in California is a Blind Idiot Translation of "Island View" that sounds foreign enough to English speakers. In Spanish it literally means the little-sensical "Seen Island" (i.e., "island seen by somebody").
- Even worse is the name of the Mar Vista neighborhood in Los Angeles, which is plainly ungrammatical in Spanish. (In real Spanish, the name that would more closely capture the intended meaning would probably be "Miramar," like Miramar, San Diego.)
- This troper is a California native and can confirm this distressing naming trend. Other examples include "Del Mar", "Los Banyos", and "Manteka" which mean, repsectively, "of the lake", "The bathrooms", and "lard".
  - "Los Baños" doesn't necessarily mean "The Bathrooms"; it can mean "The Springs." Manteca, California is a really weird example, in that the name is a misprint that displaced the original "Monteca" name; it's not clear what "Monteca" was intended to mean, though there is a place in El Salvador with that name. "Del Mar" means "Of the Sea," and it makes no damn sense indeed.
According to some scholars, the name of the US state of Idaho was invented as part of a hoax. It supposedly was chosen as a nonsense word that sounded vaguely Native American (never mind that that doesn't really make any linguistic sense).
- Pasadena sounds Spanish, but it's actually a prepositional phrase in a language spoken by a Native American tribe who lived thousands of miles away.
The constructed language Lojban is specifically designed so that it sounds foreign no matter what your native language is.
In Melbourne, Australia, there is an annual festival called Moomba, which was suggested as a name by local Indigenous Australians, who translated it as something along the lines of "let's get together and have fun". It is widely claimed that a more accurate translation would be something like "anus", only less polite.
- Certainly puts a new spin on Final Fantasy VIII.
This You Tube commentor's review of animated teaser trailer, "Despical Me", voices this trope perfectly - "Why are Egyptians speaking English in an Indian accent? Funny how big budget Hollywood movies still can't tell the difference between North Africans and South Asians. Maybe they should make a movie about how Americans are geographically challenged, instead."
Open any American math or English textbook, and you will see mismatched names that just sound foreign, in order to sound more diverse. It will always be Muhammad Nguyen(Arabic and Vietnamese) and Luz Patel(Spanish and Indian) going to the movies.

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