Quite a while ago I saw a short film called Skwerl, meant to demonstrate “how English sounds to non-English speakers”. As a native English speaker, watching it is quite surreal. The sounds and accents are totally familiar, and there are definitely words in there that you recognize, but there is no discernible overall meaning whatsoever. It’s actually kind of hard to listen to. All you’ve got to hang onto is that what you’re hearing somehow feels like English. And that’s the point. Skwerl gave me the idea to attempt to create a similar effect, but with reading instead of listening. I wanted to see how English looks to non-English readers. And so I created engl_ish.