Sandwich English (散装英语), which is different from pidgin English, refers to speeches in Chinese that are profusely punctuated with English words, usually to a fault. This unique linguistic hybrid is widely spoken among the Chinese employees at foreign companies’ establishments in China, usually when no foreigners are engaged in the conversation. Pretty ironic, huh?

If you are one of those employees, you would highly likely be bombarded on a daily basis with phrases like:

这个货物下午会从warehouse 发出

(The goods will be shipped out from the warehouse this afternoon.)

拜访完客户, 我就回office。

(I will get back to the office when I am done visiting the customer.）

我根本不 care 这件事。

(I don’t give a damn about it.）

……

In one hilarious instance, I overheard one Shanghainese lady unleashing a verbal attack against her boss, which went as follows:

侬never know阿拉boss 老错气, 吾越PMP，伊越tough翻毛腔。

(You will never know that my boss is such a jerk, for the more I toady to him, the harsher he is on me.)

I am not a big fan of my country folks, particularly the mainlanders speaking in their native tongue in this fashion, but I am pretty curious about how this burlesque language phenomenon comes down the pike.

Digging deeper into the history, you may alight on the fact that in the early days of most of the foreign companies’ China operations which were mostly headquartered in Hong Kong, the Hongkongers assumed most of the managerial posts, be it the role of top management, finance, logistics, and sales, though things have dramatically changed since the CEPA (Closer Economic Partnership Arrangement) came into effect in 2003. (I will not dwell on the impact of CEPA that has since significantly changed China’s trade and economic scenes, and deserves a lengthy monograph itself.)

Hong Kong people historically like to speak Cantonese laden with English words, which I assume has a lot to do with its colonial history, a subject I am not going to dwell on either. And their way of speaking inevitably rubs off on their mainland colleagues especially when people from the mainland still very much looked up to the Hong Kong compatriots for its much higher level of economic development then. (If you are of an age as senior as I am, you would also remember the dominance of Hong Kong pop music and culture on the mainland about one decade ago.) So, several years before, when you were roaming around Shanghai’s Huaihai Road and Lujiazui area where the Fortune 500 companies usually chooses to set up shop, it was nothing uncommon that you ran into hordes of dapper-looking office workers who vivaciously spoke in what was quizzically dubbed as Sandwich English.

To be honest, I don’t think sandwich English is universally bad, and it is especially hard for a foreign company’s Chinese staffers to avoid it when almost all of your company's internal written communications are conducted in English. For example, we usually refer to business plan as BP, life cycle management as LCM, total costs of ownership as TCO, which are much easier to utter than their Chinese translations 商业计划, 生命周期管理, 和总体拥有成本 respectively. And when there are no readily available Chinese translations for some terms like beyond zero, Mapro, Siebel, and so on, we simply don’t bother with the translations, and speak those words outright in English. And personally, I don’t see anything wrong with that.

Nevertheless, I have also witnessed umpteenth cases where people imbedded their utterance in Chinese with words like boss, office, level, care, map, computer, scare, assignment, and all kinds of generic English words, as if the language of Chinese is inadequate for articulating their thoughts and ideas, and they need the aid of English to help with their communications. This is what I define as sandwich English.

Practically speaking, what’s the point people dotting their speeches in Chinese with English words when they know perfectly how to say them accurately in Chinese? Is it beneficial to effective communications? Obviously, the answer is no.

And culturally speaking, do English word-laden sentences make you appear smart and fashionable? I seriously doubt it, as the English words usually popping up in sandwich English mostly are too generic to impress people.

One plausible explanation for the sandwich English lovers’ antics is that they are simply trying to make people laugh, and I do laugh at them.