Although the Jargon File remains primarily a lexicon of hacker usage
in American English, we have made some effort to get input from
abroad. Though the hacker-speak of other languages often uses
translations of jargon from English (often as transmitted to them by
earlier Jargon File versions!), the local variations are interesting,
and knowledge of them may be of some use to travelling hackers.

There are some references herein to `Commonwealth hackish'. These are
intended to describe some variations in hacker usage as reported in
the English spoken in Great Britain and the Commonwealth (Canada,
Australia, India, etc. -- though Canada is heavily influenced by
American usage). There is also an entry on [140]Commonwealth Hackish
reporting some general phonetic and vocabulary differences from U.S.
hackish.

Hackers in Western Europe and (especially) Scandinavia report that
they often use a mixture of English and their native languages for
technical conversation. Occasionally they develop idioms in their
English usage that are influenced by their native-language styles.
Some of these are reported here.

On the other hand, English often gives rise to grammatical and
vocabulary mutations in the native language. For example, Italian
hackers often use the nonexistent verbs `scrollare' (to scroll) and
`deletare' (to delete) rather than native Italian `scorrere' and
`cancellare'. Similarly, the English verb `to hack' has been seen
conjugated in Swedish. In German, many Unix terms in English are
casually declined as if they were German verbs - thus:
mount/mounten/gemountet; grep/grepen/gegrept; fork/forken/geforkt;
core dump/core-dumpen, core-gedumpt. And Spanish-speaking hackers use