It's not unheard of there to be English language tracks that drop in random French, Italian or Spanish words and phrases

It's just regular cultural exposure to other languages ultimately. No rule says you need to stick to one language in a song, so some musicians throw in some stuff from other languages they've heard, because why not

You know how many French words/phrases I hear in English songs? Coup de x, raison d'être, déjà vu, etc

This is more of a question than a thought, but apparently the English language borrows from lots of Latin-ish and other alphabetic languages of centuries past.

Yes English is awkward. I didn't write the rules or definitions either. 🤷

English contains a veritable shitload of loanwords as well.

But you're not wrong when you think they're trying to be cool. You'll hear this most often in hiphop, which started in English and not every language lends itself to rap. So they throw in an f-bomb here or there. Imitation is the highest form of flattery type stuff.

Also, English is the most commonly learned foreign language on this planet. A lot of contemporary music genres came out of North America. I would say internet culture is most pervasive in English as well. A lot of tech jargon becomes English loanwords in other languages. There are reasons beyond wanting to sound cool as well.

As if US music isn't full of random Spanish words

Oh well, que sera sera.....

Umm.. don’t plenty of English language songs do this too?

you know the saying that english is five languages in a trenchcoat that drags other languages into alleyways to ruffle through their pockets for loose nouns?

english is basically the european pidgin language.

Not just songs, but all the other languages showing up in English comes up conversationally too! When you did something wrong, there's the "mea culpa". Or in the courts, there are tons of Latin phrases like "nolo contendre". I've had "perritos calientes" (hot dogs, literally hot puppies) in Spain, but never have I had a "giant cheese" (quesadilla) or "little donkey" (burrito) in the states. And we just borrow other phrases as-is like "Je ne sais quoi" and schadenfreude.

Domo arigato, Mr. Roboto.....
Michelle, ma belle, Sont des mots qui vont très bien ensemble....
Psycho Killer, Qu'est-ce que c'est?....
Voulez-vous coucher avec moi, ce soir?....
Jeux sans frontières, Hans plays with Lotte, Lotte plays with Jane...
Eyes without a face, Les yeux sans visage....
This indecision's buggin' me (esta indecisión me molesta)...
Ooh, appelle-moi, mon chéri, appelle-moi, Anytime, anyplace, anywhere, any way....
and many more.

♫ Voulez-Vous Coucher Avec Moi Ce Soir ♫

Yes, I can imagine. It's done literally all the time, in every genre.

The english language literally steals words from other languages and adopts them.

Macabre Ennui Taco Plaza Café Ballet Cuisine Restaurant Elite Genre Police Patio Rodeo Canyon Guitar Tomato Mosquito Hamburger Wanderlust Angst Pizza Pasta Piano Opera Balcony Volcano Algebra

I can keep going but I think you get the point. Some english songs do throw in other languages at times too.

Many Asian songs, especially Japanese and Korean will often include english because they are all taught english in school and english is used in the business world. When visiting Korea and Japan, in major cities, a large amount of signage will include english to aid tourists.

Same reason some English songs have random words in other languages I guess.

I was in Germany once many years ago, and was riding the train with a bunch of college kids. They only swore in English, everything else was German.

I don't have to because there are? Does no one recall those guts who were Kung Fu fighting? The rumor is that those cats were fast as lightning.

In Dutch we have a term called "borrowed words", those are words we stole from a different language.

For example "Portefeuille" is a Dutch word, but it originate from the French. Another example is "computer", we do not have/use a Dutch variant.

Using these words in a song will sound like your described. But it's actually still Dutch

This happens all the time with music. Especially with bilingual people. Maybe listen to more music, kid.

Just looking at the words in your title, “country”, “random”, and “imagine” were all borrowed from Old French.

I can think of quite a few English songs with random words from other languages.

I don't have to imagine it.

I listen to Mars Volta. They like to use random, non-English words a lot. But they usually use them correctly in the English sentence if you look up what the word is, which is not at all like most Japanese music I've heard injecting English into the Japanese. Most of the time, the Japanese music I listen to is being really nonsensical and seems to just throw the english in because it sounds cool, not because it fits any meaning.

Spanish phrases or even entire Spanish verses aren't unheard of in English-language music

That would've been brilliant for Firefly.

laughs in sigaretta

Multilanguage songs are the best thing. It's part of artistic expression, and a reminder to ourselves that at some point, all humans came from a different place.

It's almost always bigger languages.

Karel nese asi čaj by Jiří Korn and Vilém Čok

This Czechoslovak song is mostly in Czech but also features number sequences from (in order of appearance): German, French, Italian, English, Czech. (The younger singer, Vilém Čok, was not explicitly anti-Communist but the censor ruined his career anyway because this song was "too weird", and it didn't recover except for the 1-minute intros to Ducktales and Chip'n'Dale he sang in 1990. That was recently ruled illegal even by 80s standards but the censor got a slap on the wrist. Čok was audibly laughing at the verdict because there was little else he could do.)

Another non-English ones that come to mind are 1980s parodies of the countless Italian hits from back then (Sarà perché ti amo, Made in Italy, Ti amo, L'italiano etc.) by Jaroslav Uhlíř and Karel Šíp with some self-referential humor. I think that's why my aunt, a language teacher, learned Italian first and only got good at English after failing to find a job in the 00s.

But otherwise, the foreign-language content people mostly consume is English, and the songs reflect that. (Even imported words − do you think „fajn“ (pronounced fine) as seen in „One, two, three, všechno, co je fajn, se smí“ (a line from the aforementioned song) is from German fein meaning “delicate”?)

Literally I feel like they're just trying to say: "Hey this is a foreign language I'm sooo cooool!"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYvhhMjW32k

Yes, but english has like 30% or original germanic roots and rest is a mix of french, latin, spanish, greek and you name it. I would hazard a guess that english is one of the most loanloaded languages in the world.

If you listen to Gothic, Medieval, or Metal music, they mix different languages all the time. Finnish and English. Italian and French. And anything can be mixed with Latin. It's quite normal.

Watch firefly, they have a lot chinese words mixed in with English. I don't speak Chinese, so I don't know if it's real, but subtitles say [mandarin] so I assume they're real words. But they flip flop quite beautifully.

I wager the same reason a lot of comic books reference japanese culture or style in some form: they revolutionized comic illustration and printing technology for the modern era.

The USA had a similar effect on Television, movies, and radio broadcasts.

If tomorrow India invented a Neutron Teleportation based communication technology and used it to broadcast media to a receiver through the crust of the earth faster than sattelite, then whatever media they broadcast in the beginning would likely have longlasting impacts on culture everywhere.

Wonderful day!

Just in case, there's a term in "anglicism":

...word or construction borrowed from English by another language. Due to the global dominance of English in the 20th and 21st centuries, many English terms have become widespread in other languages.
Technology-related English words like internet and computer are prevalent across the globe, as there are no pre-existing words for them.
English words are sometimes imported verbatim and sometimes adapted to the importing language in a process similar to anglicisation.

Source

For more than a decade, I've been trying to learn Russian, mostly for the art and the job I have. And, I did notice that there are words, in common/casual speech that do indeed include pure English terms/words, or even adapted from.
There's a Russian page for "Anglicism", too:
- https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%90%D0%BD%D0%B3%D0%BB%D0%B8%D1%86%D0%B8%D0%B7%D0%BC%D1%8B

It makes sense, since it's one of the most easiest languages out there, with straightforward rules, with some exceptions you get on the road, and rare/archaic words you get eventually memorized in your own dictionary.
The Email messages are in the common/formal form/template even, you may know, too! I.e., header/body/footer/signature.

For example, I'll try recalling some:

- "гаджет" ~ "gadget";
- "дилер" ~ "dealer";
- "фрилансер" ~ "freelancer";
- "комп"/"компьютер" ~ "computer";
- "чилить"/"чилю" ~ "chilling";
- "таск" ~ "task";
- "бейба" ~ "baby";
- "чика" ~ "chick";
- "аутсорсинг" ~ "outsource";
- "секси" ~ "sexy";
- "гайд" ~ "guide";
- "булинг" ~ "bulling";
- "трабл" ~ "trouble";
- "маркетинг" ~ "marketing";
- "постить" ~ "to post" (social network posts/articles);
- "гамать" ~ "to play a game";
- "клатч" ~ "clutch";
- "дедлайн" ~ "deadline";
- "бит" ~ "bit";
- "байт" ~ "byte";
- "клуб" ~ "club";
...
- or even... "эйчар" ~ "HR" (head hunter, employer)...

These I recalled now only, and I do believe it's possible to write/base any English word in Russian.
Though, nowadays, my main is English, I was born in Lithuania, and Lithuanian language does also feature such words!
For example, "skenuoti" (to scan); "baitas" (byte), "seifas" (safe/safebox); "clubas" (club); etc.

Such a miraculous magnificent world of language development!

I think it just stands out because you suddenly understand a word in a different context. When English does it it doesn't stand out because it's so riddled with words from different origins that basically any random mouth sound passes as a plausible English word.

I went to a cafe and perused the menu, but I didn't see anything I liked, not even coffee, so I waltzed out and went to the gourmet delicatessen across the street where I got a Reuben with extra sauerkraut. Hard to say no to corned beef.
Afterwards I picked up the kid from kindergarten, and we picked a restaurant to go to. I wanted sushi, and they wanted tacos, so we compromised and got hamburgers.
We went home, took a shower with the new shampoo, got into our pajamas and read our favorite genre of story: macho poncho wearing jungle robots singing opera karaoke in a salsa tsunami.

We didn't adopt the words to be cool, it just fit better. It's hardly surprising that other languages would at least occasionally find one of ours useful in some mysterious way that words blend across languages.

Bismillah, No!

Not just songs. F***ing english "sprinkles" are everywhere and it's annoying beyond words. "Myllärin by Helsingin mylly". 11 cases out of 10 it sounds imbecile, not cool.

Maybe English speaking people with tattoos of Chinese letters is the equivalent?

Languages do borrow words from other languages, but this is not the phenomenon we see that OP is referencing. They are not talking about Japanese words borrowed from English. They mean entire choruses or strings of lyrics which are just put forth rendered in English (think "Let's Fighting Love." etc. Myriad examples of JPOP in particular doing this can be found in seconds.) Yes, I know you can point out a number of American songs which do this. You're very smart, but if you actually look at the numbers, non-anglosphere artists do this much more with English than the other way round.

In addition, the borrowing of words or the use of phrases from other languages by speakers of said languages does not change the place of a language in the family tree of languages. Japanese is not related to Chinese, despite more than 40% of its vocabulary being borrowed from Chinese.

English is firmly a Germanic language when examined from any real linguistic standpoint and not just what some idiot said on Tumblr 15 years ago when they realized English has some borrowed French vocabulary (which... spoiler alert: so do all of the other Germanic languages). I also find it interesting that the same pseudo-intellectuals who insist this would never insist that French, Italian or Spanish were not truly Romance languages, despite the massive borrowings into these languages of Germanic vocabulary through Gothic and Frankish which occurred in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages.

Look at the most basic and familiar registers of a language as far as vocabulary goes, look at grammar and syntax, phonology, etc. when classifying a language. The existence of borrowed vocbulary doesn't change this any more than wearing a kimono or drinking green tea would make me "part Japanese."

To answer the question: it is used as a virtue signal because English is the prestige languge of global capitalism right now. This is the same reason why self-hating anglophones think of it what they do: global capitalism treats it as a default setting (at least the most sterile, corporate-approved registers of the language, anyway.) Instead of a rich linguistic heritage, they see it the same way a fish sees water or we see the air.

Because of the US and british empires, english functions as a prestige language, the language of international trade and english language media is widespread. Many people know at least a little english, and most languages have english loan words.

Plenty of US english songs have the odd spanish word. Doesn't 小蘋果 have a korean bit? Even hebrew prayers break into aramaic every now and again.

We live in a multi-lingual world and our songs reflect that.

It's not Chinese but caliope mori does this alot with Japanese. A lot of it is pop rap and she is a ytuber so it may not be your style. She's incredibly talented though, she can do multiple simultaneous rhyme schemes while jumping between the two languages.

That feeling when you go to block someone, and you realize they're an alt of someone you already blocked....

That strongly depends on culture. In poland this doesn't happen at all. On the other side, in Japanese works I've seen not only English words included, but completely fake languages (Nier Automata Ost) or pseudo languages faking Latin or English (Madoka Ost, Hellsing TV intro)

Why does songs from non-English countries have random English words?

Because most of the audience for non-English songs, particularly younger audiences, are bilingual (or multilingual) and likely speaks English better than you do.

Can you imagine if English songs randomly have Chinese words?

Yeah, that would be unusual, English speaking audiences generally don't speak Chinese.

Styx would like a word.

This entire conversation reminds me of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fU-wH8SrFro

More people speak English than any other language

There is no pure languages anymore. All languages borrow from each other. The tunisian dialect is full of french words

🎶Come on yaah 我剛才放屁了!