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.
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.
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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.
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i get it now :)
adding to this very good answer: especially in Europe legal, cultural and language borders can differ quite a bit due to history and geography. I’m from South Tyrol, an italian province at the Austrian border. The majority of people there speak a german dialect, we have german schools, public administration and everything, but are a language minority in Italy. The historic explanation is that after WW1 this region became part of Italy, taken fron Austria-Hungary.
Further there is a third official language in South Tyrol, basically only spoken in two valleys anymore, the “Ladin”. It’s a very old language, related to similar language island in adjacent italian provinces and Switzerland. Those languages basically just preserved themselves for geographic reasons (hard accessible valleys and mountains). for this reason those languages tend to differ already between to neighbouring valleys. I was tought, that most of South Tyrol spoke Ladin at some point, but after the Swiss turned Calvinistic, the catholic (and austrian) bishop of the region forced the south-tyroleans to speak german to distance them from the heretic Swiss.^^
During WW2 the fascists in Italy forced South Tyrol to speak italian and forbade everything german, including local, personal and family names; one reson certainly was to enforce this ideology of “one nation, one culture, one people”.
Returning to OPs question: In South Tyrol there are german schools, where you learn italian and english as mandatory second languages, analogously for italian schools. Both languages are valid for any official entity (in theory). In the valleys mentiined above, they also have ladin schools.
Belgian here, let’s be honest, Belgium is an edge case, being with Switzerland the few multilingual countries in Western Europe with large proportion of the population speaking one language and the other (different from the South Tyrol situation below).
Germans, French, Dutch, Italians and Spanish living next to a borders would definitely encounter the situation described in the OP.
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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!
It’s funny I understand all that when written but couldn’t understand a word when Scandinavians speak
Rolig grej, att jag som talar svenska som modersmål och kan lite tyska kan tyyyp läsa nederländska 😃
Funny hing, for me that speaks swedish natively and know some german, I can sort of read Netherlandic😃
Oh, jeg så at du er nederlandsk :) Hoe gaat het dan met je
Alles goed :) ja, ik kom uit Nederland
Hvilket språk kan du?
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.
Yes. I learned Canadian eh?
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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.
I know that “Araf” means “Slow” in Welsh due to the road markings.
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 grew up along the border with Idaho and still can’t understand them 20 or so years later.
Only parts and bits. The languages are similar enough to communicate most of the time and Dutch people tend to be a lot better in English than Germans.
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?
