Crafting the perfect slight is an art form. If your well of funny and unexpected jabs has run dry, you could take inspiration from other languages. A Reddit post posed the question: What’s an insult in a non-English language that sounds silly or strange when translated to English? Laughs abounded in the results.
Crafting the perfect slight is an art form. If your well of funny and unexpected jabs has run dry, you could take inspiration from other languages. A Reddit $RDDT post posed the question: What’s an insult in a non-English language that sounds silly or strange when translated to English? Laughs abounded in the results.
Insults are tricky, linguistically. They are “distinguishably human,” according to José Mateo and Francisco Yus, who wrote a study on the difficulty of translating insults—but they are also “culturally bound,” meaning they may not mean the same thing in every language. For example, zorra in Spanish can be used to describe a wicked woman, but its direct translation—a fox—could be used to compliment an attractive woman in English. The connotations of insults don’t always survive the translation process, but it’s exactly this quality that can make insults in foreign languages sound absolutely hilarious to non-native speakers.
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We compiled a list of some of the strangest-sounding insults from non-English languages, inspired by cjmerc39’s Reddit post. Here are some of our favorites:
