for those who find this hard to read, it’s like my dad. he grew up in peru but by the border between peru and brazil, so he picked up portuguese.
Hey, your question is kinda weird. And I mean it in a supportive way. Your understanding of borders and languages is wrong.
Country border aren’t language borders. If the local dialect is preserved, both sides of the border can probably communicate. If not, then it becomes a question of what dialect became the standard language? are a lot of people crossing the borders regularly? which side of the border has a higher interest learning the other language?.. And so much more.
I personally know a couple languages and some are from neighbors countries. I can cross the border in less than an hour. If I talk to someone from the other side in “our” dialects, we might experience the way the other person is talking as odd but we understand each other. But those who don’t know their local dialect, have a very hard time catching on, while tbh i don’t know why. Maybe because I know both languages, I see the similarities and they don’t and get confused by differences. On my side of the border, most natives speak the other country’s language fluently, for economical reasons. On the other side, it is unusual to find someone who can speak our language, and the local dialect.
In short, you will get a mixed bag of responses and there are patterns and reasons for it but you are kinda asking the wrong question to get a meaningful answer.
A practical example and the araising questions, in Belgium people speak a bunch of languages, french, German and Flemish(/dutch). Based on what I heard, the french part of the country doesn’t tend to speak Flemish and the Flemish part doesn’t speak french (or at least don’t want to). Does the french part speak the language of their neighbor, as they speak french, or not because it is also their own language? Is Flemish a language or just a dutch dialect? What about the German speaking part? If a Belgian learned french in school, while living in Flanders, would move to the french border, would that count as speaking their neighbors language? Or not?
I like your question but it is unfortunately one based in a flawed belief/thinking.
ohhh, makes sense. i meant for example, if a polish person who lived by the polish-german border ended up learning german to communicate with germans or not.
I didn’t pick up the language of the country I grew up in, just the neighboring one’s. Have you ever heard of Trianon?
I know that “Araf” means “Slow” in Welsh due to the road markings.
Maybe not exactly what you’re asking but I grew up and live in Vancouver, Canada, which is really close to the US border. Obviously both sides speak English but I feel that the accents and slangs bleed across. I don’t really know if I’m considered to have a Canadian or American accent, or where the distinctions lie.
Yes, I did.
What language was it?
Danish. (Not a very useful language, but quirky and quite charming.)
Kan du forstå meg? (Jeg skriver på norsk, min fars språk. jeg lærer fortsatt, men jeg har hørt at norsk og dansk er veldig like)
Jada, jeg har bodd og jobbet i Norge i et par år, så ingen problemer med å forstå norsk. 😉
Forbausende!
I lived in an area that had more or less migrant workers depending on season. I did pick up some of the language as a kid, because I had friends who were part of that population, but honestly I can’t speak it now. Sometimes I can pick out the general meaning if I read it, but not often enough to be confident in my understanding.
the people on the american side mostly didn’t; while a significant portion, but still a minority, of the people on the mexican side did not.
Yea, I grew up in America and ended up being fluent in Canadian as well. I ended up emigrating there even.
I’ve got a friend from Catalonia and he’s fluent in English, Spanish and Catalan… and can get by in French.
I can understand a very significant amount of Swedish but wouldn’t say I speak Swedish per se — I can rather put on an accent and apply some regular changes and switch out a few words in a crude approximation of Swedish, but is that really the same thing? There is actually a term for that sort of blending of Swedish and Norwegian, svorsk.
ooooohhh, another norwegian speaker! i just saw you speak 4 languages, that’s awesome
Well, I should note that the situation for myself is that my mom’s first language is American English, and her second language is Norwegian, and my dad was the reverse, however both he and my mom mainly spoke English to me growing up. So I ended up growing up with both English and Norwegian, but because of the language dynamics in my family and in Norway in general, and because I was comparatively socially isolated for a long time, and because of various feedback loops, my Norwegian skills ended up basically “lagging behind” my English skills. This means that my idiolect in Norwegian has a number of prominent proscribed or eccentric features. So that’s something to keep in mind for when I put my Norwegian through this Swedish “filter” — that the Norwegian being filtered is itself already “Americanized” for lack of a better term.
Russian and Japanese are two languages that I have self-studied for a number of years. Neither of them are really up to the level I’d like, but I can still take pride in the effort I’ve put in and how far I’ve gotten, because even if my progress is slow compared to some learners, most hobbyist learners burn out and quit way sooner, right? Esperanto was one language that I tried to learn but quickly gave up on, but I’ve recently restarted learning that, and I hope and frankly expect that this time around I’ll make it to a much higher level, and it’ll become the fifth language I’ll say I can speak. And there are other languages still that I’d like to try my hands at eventually, and I’ve also been conlanging as a hobby for about a decade already, and languages are fuzzy things anyways, so just like anyone else I can sometimes understand individual words or sentences in languages I’ve never studied.
ooohhh. my dad’s first language is spanish, second language portuguese, then english :)
my mom’s first is english, then polish
also, that makes complete sense, i’ve been told i speak portuguese better than english/spanish.
Det virker som du har en veldig interessant bakgrunn, kan du fortelle mer om språkene du kan, hvordan du vokste opp, hva forholdet ditt er til disse forskjellige språkene? Jeg er også nysgjerrig om språkdynamikken der du bor, mtp portugisisk og spansk og engelsk osv, og forholdene mellom disse.
men jeg kan ikke si at jeg blander ikke sammen språkene. siden jeg er neurodivergent, er det tider som jeg kan ikke tenke på ordene på et språk.
hvis jeg er på ferie med min familie som snakker spansk og noen snakker engelsk på meg, jeg er kanskje ikke svare 😅
Nettopp, nettopp. Jeg tror dette er vanlig for de fleste flerspråklige men blir ofte mer intenst for neurodivergente.
oh sure! i’ll say this part in english for everyone who wants to read.
my dad is from peru but of cuban descent (peruvian from dad, cuban-peruvian from his mom). naturally, both his parents spoke spanish and lived in a spanish-speaking country, so dad grew up speaking spanish.
however, he lived near the peru-brazil border, where he learned portuguese from portuguese speakers he saw. (my dad’s family mostly only speaks spanish though or spanish and english)
at around ten i think, he came to the us and started to learn english.
my mom is an american of polish descent, polish is her second language when her family started teaching it to her as a young girl. (but her dad either knows spanish and didn’t teach her or doesn’t know it as a latino.)
i use spanish mainly at home, with paternal family, and with my spanish-speaking friends. english with most people because it’s a widely spoken language online and in the us, and portuguese with my dad and brazilian online people.
Yes. I learned Canadian eh?
I’ve learned French in school for 5 years, but I only speak it on a relatively basic level, despite living very close to France and crossing the border quite often. Not too big of a deal though, as many people in Alsace also speak a German/Alemannic dialect.
