Renglish

Renglish is a system of writing English in the Cyrillic.script, based on the Russian alphabet. It was created by Slacknet Communications with assistance from many Russians along with a Serbian. This system is rather uncommon, with no census of those who use this system. Estimates average around 15,000 to 50,000 people worldwide, most of them likely Slavic immigrants from Slavic countries who use Cyrillic as the official script for their languages such as Russia and Bulgaria. In Renglish, some letters do not represent Slavic sounds. For example, 'С' is the letter 'S' in Cyrillic, but is used for 'S' and 'C' in Renglish. Also, 'Ю' represents the long 'U' /u:/ sound instead of 'Yu' /ju/, 'Я' for short 'A' /æ/ instead of 'Ya' /ja/, "Ё" for /ei/ instead of /yo/, and 'Ц' for 'J' /dzh/ instead of 'Ts' (which was most likely influenced by the 'Џ'). The "Ъ" is used for the Schwa <ə> sound.^[1]

Here is an eхаmple:

• Renglish: Хелло, хоў ар йю?
• English: Hello, how are you?

Letters not present in the Russian alphabet:

• Ђ (Thelta), represents the 'th' sound, such as in father, this or width. Present in Serbo-Croatian.
• Ћ (Thorn), represents the voiceless 'th' sound, such as thing. Present in Serbo-Croatian.
• Ў (Win), represents the ⟨w⟩ sound, such as water. Present in Belarusian.

It has also been suggested that the term Renglish is used to describe a tendency of Russian people who have immigrated to the USA to insert English words into Russian sentences.^[2]

References