avatar image
Advertisement
PostMag
Life.Culture.Discovery.

Language Matters | The global language of soccer: how English gave the world football, and it gave back rabona and joga bonito

Soccer in its modern form spread from England, and with it a lexicon derived from English. But as the game spread globally, so did new terms, such as rabona and joga bonito, that English has in turn absorbed

Reading Time:2 minutes
Why you can trust SCMP
0
An amateur English soccer team in the early 20th century. England exported the game to the European continent, which adopted and adapted its English name, football. Photo: Tony Henshaw

The word on the streets is football (or soccer).

With the sport having originated in Britain – the modern form being a 19th-century adaptation of various versions of folk football played since medieval times – it is unsurprising thatthe game’s English terminology spread alongside it upon its introduction to the European continent in the late 1800s.

A caricature of 19th century English street footballers. The language of modern soccer was based on English. Picture: Alamy
A caricature of 19th century English street footballers. The language of modern soccer was based on English. Picture: Alamy

Many languages directly borrowed the word for football: fotbal (Rumanian), le foot(ball) (French) and futbol (Turkish). Others literally translated the meanings for “foot” and “ball”: fußball (German), voetbal (Dutch) and jalkapallo (Finnish). Some languages maintain two forms for the term: fútbol, balompié (Spanish), futbol, piłka nozna (Polish). Another commonly borrowed term is goal: gol in the Romance languages, Russian and Korean, and goru in Japanese.

But going global works both ways. Teams have become increasingly international over the past two decades, following the 1995 European Court of Justice Bosman ruling on the free movement of labour within the EU; an English Premier League club fielding a starting 11 without any Englishmen is no longer novel.

Angel Di Maria executes a spectacular rabona kick for Paris St Germaiin against Metz in a French Ligue 1 Cup match. Inset is Italian Giovanni Roccotelli, who popularised the technique, doing what was then known as an incrocriata in the 1970s. Picture: Alamy
Angel Di Maria executes a spectacular rabona kick for Paris St Germaiin against Metz in a French Ligue 1 Cup match. Inset is Italian Giovanni Roccotelli, who popularised the technique, doing what was then known as an incrocriata in the 1970s. Picture: Alamy

This year’s Fifa World Cup has seen 25 of the 32 teams field at least one foreign-born player during qualification. Refreshingly, terms from other languages have also become global football-speak.

Lisa Lim
Lisa Lim is Associate Professor in the School of Education at Curtin University in Perth, having previously held professoriate positions at universities in Singapore, Amsterdam, Sydney and Hong Kong, where she was Head of the University of Hong Kong's School of English. Her interests encompass multilingualism, World Englishes, minority and endangered languages, and the sociolinguistics of globalisation. Books written by Lim include Languages in Contact (Cambridge University Press, 2015) and The Multilingual Citizen (Multilingual Matters, 2018).
Advertisement