A Spanish Cow.

April 25, 2026 by 38 Comments

From the misty depths of my youth I remember the expression parler français comme une vache espagnole (literally ‘to speak French like a Spanish cow’), meaning to speak the language badly. It occurred to me to wonder if this is still something persons of Frenchness actually say, and (more importantly) if there are equivalents in other languages; I suspect English is unusual in not having a colorful xenophobic phrase to express the concept.

Comments

  1. David Eddyshaw says
    April 25, 2026 at 3:54 pm

    Hausa does the opposite thing with a talking animal:

    Ya iya Hausa kamar jakin Kano.
    “He speaks Hausa like a Kano donkey.” (i.e. very well.)

  2. cuchuflete says
    April 25, 2026 at 4:28 pm

    I looked at the multi-lingual Refranero and found nothing.

    It’s a good tool for such questions.

    https://cvc.cervantes.es/lengua/refranero/Busqueda.aspx

  3. Jen in Edinburgh says
    April 25, 2026 at 4:29 pm

    Are Kano donkeys known for their linguistic skills?

    (Temporarily Jen-in-Wales. It is hard to say Welsh names with a Scottish tongue)

  4. David Eddyshaw says
    April 25, 2026 at 4:34 pm

    Are Kano donkeys known for their linguistic skills?

    It would appear so …

    I’m sorry to say that my own fieldwork provides no clear answer.

  5. Pau Amma says
    April 25, 2026 at 4:44 pm

    Folk etymology often claims that idiom is derived from “… comme un Basque espagnol” (“… like a Spanish Basque”) but if anything, https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=comme+une+vache+espagnole%2C+comme+un+Basque+espagnol&year_start=1800&year_end=2022&corpus=fr&smoothing=3 hints that any connection probably goes the other way.

  6. AntC says
    April 25, 2026 at 6:01 pm

    There’s a English phrase (which I think is more U.S. than Brit) ‘X million Frenchmen can’t be wrong’. As X = Fifty, it first appeared sez wikip in a 1927 Hit song from a 1929 Broadway musical.

    “had a lot to do with capturing the frothy Gallic essence implicit in the title…”

    I first heard it in a (U.S.) book on sail-racing tactics, weirdly enough, ~1970’s.

    What is this elusive national characteristic the French are supposed to exhibit?

  7. J.W. Brewer says
    April 25, 2026 at 6:29 pm

    @AntC: Frenchmen Schmenchmen. Whatever may have been the case back in the Coolidge years, in “modern” America the locus classicus of that phrase doesn’t involve the French. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50,000,000_Elvis_Fans_Can%27t_Be_Wrong:_Elvis%27_Gold_Records,_Volume_2

  8. J.W. Brewer says
    April 25, 2026 at 6:31 pm

    As to the Kano donkey, Kano’s a Hausaphone town, innit? You’d need e.g. “like a Lagos donkey” for the concept to be parallel, since implicit in the French phrase is the assumption that a local cow would be less disfluent in French than a Spanish one.

  9. David Eddyshaw says
    April 25, 2026 at 6:37 pm

    That’s why I said “opposite.”

    The conventional way to insult someone’s command of Hausa is to say that they talk one of the

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gbagyi_people

    but no Gwari animals are invoked.

    (I didn’t actually know that the unlovely Ibrahim Babangida is a Bagwari. I think I’d be inclined to keep quite about it if I was a Bagwari writing a puff-piece about my own people on WP.)

    I’m not sure there is a conventional way to insult someone’s command of Kusaal in Kusaal. The matter probably doesn’t arise often enough.

  10. CuConnacht says
    April 25, 2026 at 6:40 pm

    The people who say that it should be “comme un Basque espagnol” remind me of the people who turned Welsh rabbit into Welsh rarebit. “But cows can’t talk!” “But there’s no rabbit in it!”

  11. J.W. Brewer says
    April 25, 2026 at 7:16 pm

    Arnold Zwicky had a blogpost on this expression noting his skepticism at the attempt to explain “vache” as Basque” which attracted a useful comment to the effect that “vache” is used insultingly in French in other contexts as well, as illustrated by the use of https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mort_aux_vaches_! where we might say, or at least once have said, “death to the pigs.” Or perhaps “acid is groovy, kill the pigs” for a full period effect.

  12. rozele says
    April 25, 2026 at 8:21 pm

    @AntC: in both the song (as sung by sophie tucker) and the musical titled for it (a cole porter not-quite-classic*), it’s definitely the libertinism, or (shall we say) relaxed attitude towards things sexual**, compared to these puritan shores. so just the usual! (i think the elvis record is doing the classically u.s. thing of using a slightly out-of-date sugestive phrase to provide (barely-)plausible deniability to marketing based largely on sex appeal.)

    .
    * though its numbers about the sexual culture of the day – “You’ve Got That Thing”, “Find Me a Primitive Man”, “The Boyfriend Back Home”, “I’m Unlucky at Gambling”, etc. – are both revealing and fun (with the usual caveat about auntie cole being just a bit racist…).

    ** and alcoholic***: the show opens with “A Toast to Volstead”.

    *** and also racial (at least when suitably intermingled with the aforementioned pleasures of the flesh): “The Happy Heaven of Harlem” proposes that said favored slumming-ground of the adventurous and well-heeled had “moved to paree”.

  13. mollymooly says
    April 25, 2026 at 8:23 pm

    Jim Courier began his acceptance speech after winning the 1992 French Open “je parle comme une vache espagnole”, which charmed the crowd (not that that proves the expression was current among L1 speakers then, let alone now).

    In 1993 Courier lost the final to Sergi Bruguera and, perhaps not entirely extemporaneously, called his conqueror a “taureau espagnol”.

  14. Vanya says
    April 25, 2026 at 10:25 pm

    I found a 4 year old Reddit thread where a French speaker is asking if one can say «je parle espagnol comme une vache espagnole » to say one speaks Spanish badly. That implies the idiom is still current.

    The consensus answer by the way is that one cannot say that, Spanish cows may indeed speak Spanish, or in any case you need the contrasting nationality to keep the jokiness. Some native speakers think you can use the expression for any language but Spanish, e.g. «je parle russe comme une vache espagnole » sounds cromulent to them. Others say, no it is only supposed to be used for speaking French badly.

  15. rozele says
    April 25, 2026 at 10:46 pm

    “je parle catalan comme une vache espagnole” or “je parle catalan comme une vache castillane”?

  16. AntC says
    April 26, 2026 at 3:14 am

    it’s definitely the libertinism, or (shall we say) relaxed attitude towards things sexual**, compared to these puritan shores. so just the usual!

    Thanks @rozele, and @JWB. Hmm. That doesn’t seem to fit the context. [**]

    In a race against a fleet of able competitors, if you think you’ve found a cunning tactic to get ahead of the crowd, but nobody else switches to your side of the course, it’s conceivable that wise heads have already considered and rejected your tactic, and the also-rans would rather bet on their being right. Fifty [***] million Frenchmen can’t be wrong.

    The book may well have been written much before the ’70’s (my father had a habit of finding ‘bargains’ in second-hand bookshops). Certainly the author was a wizened greybeard, who quite possibly had never heard of Elvis Presley; could even have been ignorant of (or too prurient for) the Porter antecedent. Perhaps he was using the phrase more-or-less literally? (But still, why “Frenchmen” specifically?)

    [**] It is remotely possible, I suppose, that I’m not accurately remembering advice I read half a century ago. Or indeed that in those innocent years I wasn’t sufficiently well up on “the usual” to grasp the entendre.

    [***] It could have been merely ‘A million’. Googling is finding variations on the meme.

  17. Mike Chisholm says
    April 26, 2026 at 4:29 am

    “I suspect English is unusual in not having a colorful xenophobic phrase to express the concept”

    Well, there’s always “He speaks English like a native… A native of [pick your racist country]”.

    The humiliating thing is the idiomatic ease with which foreign politicians and even vox poppers on foreign streets *do* speak our language when interviewed on the BBC. I suspect many Brits and Americans presume that English is some sort of universal inbuilt default language, and that foreigners are simply being rude by pretending not to speak it. See: the Bible. There must be a Noel Coward / Tom Lehrer song about this somewhere.

  18. David Eddyshaw says
    April 26, 2026 at 5:19 am

    Has not Chomsky Himself shown that all languages are but mere notational variants of English?

  19. Nat Shockley says
    April 26, 2026 at 6:08 am

    The comments on this post give the overall impression that maybe “having a colorful xenophobic phrase to express the concept” is not very universal at all… as does this:
    https://languagehat.com/france-please-dont-do-that/

  20. David Marjanović says
    April 26, 2026 at 10:36 am

    The humiliating thing is the idiomatic ease with which foreign politicians and even vox poppers on foreign streets *do* speak our language when interviewed on the BBC.

    8–12 years of competent school plus total pop culture immersion plus general motivation to learn what is currently the international language (plus any university) will do that.

  21. languagehat says
    April 26, 2026 at 11:00 am

    The comments on this post give the overall impression that maybe “having a colorful xenophobic phrase to express the concept” is not very universal at all

    Yes, I have come to the same conclusion.

  22. Frans says
    April 26, 2026 at 2:30 pm

    You do have expressions like double Dutch, for better or worse.

  23. rozele says
    April 26, 2026 at 3:16 pm

    @AntC: my guess would be that it is a significantly later use – or at least a far-removed-from-the-original use – that took the phrase just as a degree of certainty, not knowing the subject that it was devised about.

    @Frans: it’s interesting that the non-linguistic idioms with “dutch” are neutral to complimentary. “double dutch” in the jump-rope sense is the high-skill sphere; “going dutch” may have a tinge of stinginess in its semantics, but i think by now that’s largely evaporated; “dutch courage” is maybe the most negative, but the courage it evokes isn’t considered false even if the means are artificial.

  24. David Eddyshaw says
    April 26, 2026 at 3:16 pm

    @Frans:

    Lots of languages have a preferred archetypal “incomprehensible foreign language”, like “it’s all Greek to me.” We once looked at that (I remember that there was a pretty chart of who was most incomprehensible to whom.)

  25. Brett says
    April 26, 2026 at 4:26 pm

    @David Eddyshaw: Here’s the post specifically about that, linking back to another at Atlas Obscura. There was a chart at this older Language Log post, which Hat also linked to.

    That last linked thread also has a discussion of Dutch specifically as a representative of unintelligibility, as well as other mildly derogatory “Dutch” expressions.

  26. mollymooly says
    April 26, 2026 at 4:46 pm

    I think there are some idioms that are kept alive by adults using them ostentatiously for the benefit of children, to teach them about idioms. Maybe the vache espagnole is one, “raining cats and dogs” another.

  27. ktschwarz says
    April 26, 2026 at 5:12 pm

    And both those languagehat posts that Brett linked to also have comments on “comme une vache espagnole”. Everything circles back!

  28. January First-of-May says
    April 26, 2026 at 6:42 pm

    From the Zompist phrasebook:

    I understand your language perfectly.
    Je parle français comme une vache espagnole.
    Hablo español como un gringo borracho.
    Ich sprechen deutsch wie italienisch Fußballtrainer.

    (other subpages include versions in Russian, Italian, Danish, Dutch, and [Mandarin] Chinese; I’m not personally familiar with the Russian phrase provided)
    [EDIT: the Danish one apparently didn’t get the reference]

  29. Lars Mathiesen (he/him/his) says
    April 27, 2026 at 2:32 am

    No wonder. I don’t get the reference either, but I assume it’s Monty? Anyway, the English pattern doesn’t reference any archetypical speakers of broken English.

  30. Jerry Friedman says
    April 27, 2026 at 8:18 am

    I don’t know whether there’s a reference, Python or other, but I think the idea is that when English-speakers say they understand your language perfectly, you can assume they can’t translate out of a wet paper bag.

  31. Frans says
    April 27, 2026 at 10:28 am

    There’s a Monty Python sketch where John Cleese plays a Spaniard or some such reading from a phrasebook, but where it should say something like “thank you very much” instead it says things along the lines of “your mother is a slut”. I don’t think this Zompist phrasebook is related though.

    Edit: it’s Hungarian
    https://montypython.fandom.com/wiki/Dirty_Hungarian_Phrasebook

  32. Jerry Friedman says
    April 27, 2026 at 12:02 pm

    Yes, that sketch is a classic.

    I shouldn’t have said “translate”. I think the point is that if an English-speaker says they understand another language, they mean they can’t speak it decently. Thus this thread is one with https://languagehat.com/the-languages-we-dont-know/.

  33. J.W. Brewer says
    April 27, 2026 at 3:19 pm

    Also some discussion of idioms including “Dutch” in this thread https://languagehat.com/language-name-typology/, wherein I block-quoted the late Steve Albini perversely pulling the (wooden?) leg of an earnest Dutch interviewer.

    I think pretty much all of them were originally pejorative but some have drifted due to either changed circumstances or changes in usage. I think the jumprope sense of “double Dutch” may reflect a slight-but-important shift from “something that’s incomprehensible, and perhaps intentionally so” to “something that’s quite difficult, and thus impressive, to master.”

  34. Brett says
    April 27, 2026 at 6:17 pm

    Interestingly, somebody involved in jump rope activities created the name double Irish for a closely related version of the double rope activity. It involves rotating the two ropes in the opposite directions from double Dutch. I first encountered the term in the 1980s, but it never seemed to be in particularly common use.

  35. polygone hexagone says
    May 1, 2026 at 10:38 am

    I’ve been informed that the “comme une vache espagnole” may be a corruption of “comme un basque espagnole” – the basque country lies over both France and Spain

  36. Rodger C says
    May 1, 2026 at 10:44 am

    @polygone: Covered above.

  37. Philippe Billé says
    May 2, 2026 at 2:45 am

    I am French, born 1956, and your note makes me remember this expression, that I had not heard since long ago…

  38. mollymooly says
    May 2, 2026 at 8:18 am

    somebody involved in jump rope activities created the name double Irish—not to be confused with the Double Irish with a Dutch Sandwich

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