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The tankero was originally a fictional animal that was quite popular in Finnish media in the 1970s.

The word is said to have been coined when Prime Minister of Finland Ahti Karjalainen visited a Kenyan zoo in the 1970s. He is reported as having said "Kaikki eläimet ovat tankeroita" (Finnish for "All animals are tankeros"), after misunderstanding a sign that said "All animals are dangerous".

This was so popular that one Finnish magazine held a drawing competition of what the tankero would look like. The Finnish political cartoonist Kari Suomalainen drew a strip where Kalevi Sorsa meets Karjalainen and a strange-looking animal he is carrying on a leash. "Is that a tankero?" asks Sorsa, and the strange-looking animal replies "No, that's Ahti."

During the same period a certain amount of jokes, based on English-Finnish language misunderstandings, were current: for example a person mistakenly greeting a Crimean by calling him criminal. These jokes were labelled as "tankero-jokes" and generally told with Ahti Karjalainen as the main character.

The original meaning fell into disuse after Karjalainen's death, and today it is a slang word for something that is awkward or not properly developed, especially poor knowledge of the pronunciation or grammar of a foreign language.

It should be noted that by far the most common use of the tankero-word today is "tankero-englanti" or "tankero-English", meaning poorly pronounced English. The term has very strong connotations of awkward-sounding pronunciation with a very strong Finnish accent. The actual grammar and vocabulary of "tankero-English" may well be correct, though.