FIFA linguistics
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Today's Tank McNamara:
Has the English word goal actually been borrowed into Uzbek?
Spanish seems to have borrowed gol, and likewise Portuguese, Italian, Turkish, Czech, etc. — but German has tor, French has but , Icelandic has mark, and many other languages have doubtless preserved native words for football scores.
Though commenters may have better information about fans' actual celebratory verbalizations…
Update — FWIW, Google Translate says that Uzbek for "It's a goal!" is "Bu gol!"
Yuval said,
June 28, 2026 @ 11:04 am
Hebrew definitely has גול, but the most famous announcer meltdown moment in Israel's history happens to feature the Biblical exclamation "שער!".
VVOV said,
June 28, 2026 @ 1:36 pm
For what it's worth, "gol" in Spanish is used for only 1 of 2 senses of the English soccer/football "goal"; the point scored is "un gol", but the physical structure the ball is kicked into is "el arco" or "la portería" (depending on country/region). I don't know how it is in Portuguese, etc.
VVOV said,
June 28, 2026 @ 1:41 pm
@Yuval, can you explain what's happening in that "announcer meltdown" for the non Hebrew speakers?
Yuval said,
June 28, 2026 @ 2:54 pm
Sure, it's a fun one.
The year is 1994, Israel is completing its first-ever world cup preliminaries as a UEFA team (= playing in Europe), which has come along pretty miserably, 4 points in eight matches, of memory serves me right, last place in the six-team group. Game nine is in Paris, with France needing just 1 point in its last two games to qualify to the WC, where they would be contenders for the trophy. France leads 2-1 by the 80th minute, but Berkovic scores an equalizer. This video joins us in the 93rd minute (I think? just follow the link) when Atar stuns the audience with the 3-2, and broadcaster Meir Einstein loses his shit and his voice with the constant scream following the highly unlikely goal. Avi Ratzon, his commentator, shortly enters history as well with his repetitive "Meir calm down".
Epilogue: Israel finishes last with this being the only victory; France loses the last game to Bulgaria and sits WC94 out (Bulgaria knocks out Germany to digital 4th), Einstein keeps broadcasting for decades but is still synonymous with this ten seconds of shrieking.
Yuval said,
June 28, 2026 @ 2:57 pm
…Or were you asking what Sha'ar שער means? That's just "goal", literally from "gate".
(enjoying gboard's two misinterpretations of words in my previous comment; serves me right for typing that epic tale on my phone.)
Chris Button said,
June 28, 2026 @ 3:12 pm
I've always loved Victor Hugo Morales's timeless on-the-spot coinage of ¡Diegoool! In honor of Diego Maradona's "goal of the century" during the Mexico 86 World Cup.
Andreas Johansson said,
June 29, 2026 @ 5:36 am
Swedish uses mål, meaning basically "target", for both the act of scoring and the physical structure you're trying to put the ball in.
Andreas Johansson said,
June 29, 2026 @ 5:39 am
(Sw. mål "dialect, speech variety" – which surely has been brought up at LL at some point – appears to be unrelated.)
J.W. Brewer said,
June 29, 2026 @ 7:01 am
The word "goal" has some separate diagnostic relevance in English dialectology, as certain AmEng speakers like myself who grew up near Philadelphia are sometimes (perhaps imprecisely) said to have a GOAT-GOAL split. I.e., our "GOAT vowel" as pronounced in "goat" itself is notably fronted by American standards but by contrast we utter "goal" with a quite different vowel that's not really fronted at all. I say "imprecisely" because John Wells himself* has said that he doesn't think there's a separate GOAL lexical set because the different vowel is merely an allophone that predictably manifests immediately before /l/ (or possibly just before "dark /l/").
*at a comment in this thread: https://phonetic-blog.blogspot.com/2011/05/evidence-of-vows.html
languagehat said,
June 30, 2026 @ 8:08 am
It would appear the Uzbek word is in fact (and unsurprisingly) gol.
Jonathan Smith said,
June 30, 2026 @ 10:05 am
Mandarin struggles here. You just gotta say "[qiu2] jin4le" "[the ball] went in." The physical goal is men2 'gate'.
Related: people (?) love to troll the U.S. about "soccer" vs. transparent/folksy "football" — but the "football" words in e.g. Romance are largely loans anyway so. It's not clear to me whether the words in Germanic are thoroughly native parallel formations, or also kinda loans on some level. Mandarin, Taiwanese and I'm sure many others use god's honest (calqued?) compounds "foot" + "ball"… or OK Mand. zu2 'foot,leg' is archaic, so not that honest.
V said,
June 30, 2026 @ 12:31 pm
Yuval : I remember both the win against France in the final game of the qualifying group and the one against Germany in the quarter-finals. Both great games.
V said,
June 30, 2026 @ 12:52 pm
There's also a thing about a commentator in Bulgaria related to one of those matches. He's also now primarily known for that.
Philip Taylor said,
June 30, 2026 @ 5:09 pm
Aging-brain syndrome — I was about to comment on V's immediately preceding comment, asking how on earth a commentator could be related to a march, when suddenly his meaning became clear …
V said,
July 1, 2026 @ 3:25 pm
Philip Taylor : eh, it's pretty obscure, but if you look up "Господ е българин" (God is Bulgarian) on some video sharing site, it will probably come up first. It's hilarious.
V said,
July 1, 2026 @ 3:41 pm
Especially the exclamations after Kostadinov's goal. Both in French and Bulgarian TV.