#sikmun

(poll at the end)

Sikmun (Bislama)

Unable to find IPA

Translation: Menstrual period

Bislama is an English-based creole with around 14 200 speakers. It is spoken in Vanuatu, where it’s the national language and used as a lingua franca to facilitate communication between speakers of the 110 living languages. Bislama emerged in the late 1800s due to the practice of “blackbirding”, aka deceiving or kidnapping Pacific Islanders and taking them to work as indentured labourers on plantations, mainly in Australia and Fiji. Due to everyone speaking different languages, a pidgin emerged that later became a creole. This language was taken to Vanuatu when labourers returned and spread because it could be used as a lingua franca. Most of the vocabulary is English-based with some French, but the grammar is typical of local languages.

Motivation: Sick moon???? That’s such a rad way of describing it, it sounds so cool…

(note: the original submission said sigmun, sikmun was the spelling I found in the Bislama spelling dictionary as well as in text examples)

爆炸, bào zhà (Mandarin Chinese)

[paʊ ʈʂa]

Translation: explosion

Chinese is a Sino-Tibetan macrolanguage (a dialect continuum consisting of different varieties that are distinct languages based the criterium of mutual intelligibility, but commonly referred to as a single language) with around 1 350 300 000 speakers that consists of 16 recognised languages, often referred to as dialects. Out of these, Mandarin Chinese is the largest, as 70% of Chinese speakers have it as their native language. The Beijing dialect of Mandarin forms the basis of Standard Chinese, which is the national language and taught in schools all over China.

Motivation 1: Super fun to say (BAO ZHA allows for some intense chest yells!!), lovely meaning, has become a joke among my friend group and our Chinese teacher thinks it's very funny

Motivation 2: Explode is an inherently funny word. Also me and my friends learned this word back in like Chinese ii (super early on, we were still learning basic grammar) and our Chinese teacher does not like it very much. Once they got in trouble for putting it in a presentation that was being graded for our ib myp certificate (international baccalaureate; bigshot honors program).

Note: This was submitted as Mandarin Chinese by at least one of the four submitters of this one word (thank you for sparing me the detective work). The two best motivations were put on the post