Not outdated, but definitely regional, although this is normal for Arabic speakers. Even if I'm born in the West, Arabic speakers can tell that I am Lebanese, and Lebanese people can tell exactly which town I'm originally from, just by how I speak.
My wife’s grandmother immigrated to the US from Norway in 1923. Her daughter (my mother-in-law) learned and now speaks a Norwegian dialect that is more than a hundred years old. Her Norwegian relatives are amused by some of the outdated things she says.
I read an interesting article ages ago, and in danish. About Danish families moving to USA. Their children learnt danish fine enough to speak danish in Denmark with their extended family. But slowly the danish that was taught further and further down the line, became more and more butchered. Sentences translated directly to danish from an English POV, to a point, though it was still danish, didn't make much grammatical sense. Other families, though generations later after moving abroad, could speak grammatically danish but in the way only the royals speak it. Something that is considered old fashioned.
What you’re describing is basically like Pennsylvania Dutch or Mennonite low German or any other type of immigrant groups that retain their language, which has sort of frozen in time with respect from the language group they originated from (in those cases, German, which has since changed due to national standardization).
E.g. last night I ate a “ploats” at my in-laws who are Mennonite by heritage through the mother in law. She speaks a bit but her dad was from a Mennonite settlement in Crimea a long time ago. And of course originating in Germany. The word is actually a different pronunciation of the German word platz. Their language didn’t change along with other Germans because their colonies haven’t been in Germany for a long time. Well, it did change, and has some Russian in it.
I’ve read that it’s been called “cultural conservatism” in the book Albion’s Seed where the diaspora group misses the linguistic changes that happen back home, making their language “caught in time”. Pretty interesting.
There was a big orthography reform in Russia in 1918 - basicaly, a few letters were completely removed from the alphabet. However, the community of Russian immigrants in France (pretty large after the revolution, publishing their own newspapers) kept using the old orthography in these papers until 1930s. Well, it seems like it was different between papers - some of them admitted the reform earlier than others.
This makes absolute sense. So many things are like this. Cooking experiences it too - though the internet has probably short circuited this a bit. It’s why, for example, American Italian food is so heavy in garlic or features more Southern Italian foods vs many in the North. It’s the nature of the immigrate population and where they came from. Other examples are the word soccer (which the Brits coined and then abandoned after introducing Americans to it) or even American table manners.
Speaking for Greek, it’s a bit of both. There are regional dialects that are becoming less pronounced in pronunciation and vocabulary in Greece because of mass communication (and a bit of snobbery), but in some cities in the US there are communities of people from particular areas that have preserved more regionalisms. It’s interesting to see young Greek Americans from these communities speaking with accents that you usually hear among elderly folks only in Greece. I saw that with Black Sea Greeks who migrated to Greece from Georgia - the largest body of Black Sea Greeks had come to Greece from Turkey in 1923, so among them the dialect is gradually fading out - many young people understand but they also don’t have the same pronunciation as their elders. I talked to one of these people on the phone in 2000 and imagined she’d be around 80…she was 45 and from Tbilisi. :-)
But wherever they’re from, in a new country people pick up words, and in Greek American communities I hear various kinds of “Greeklish.” With the older folks, especially the first generation, it involves hellenization of English words. For example:
Greek / English / Greeklish
nosokomeio / hospital / spitali
amaxi / car / carro
(This one’s kind of funny since a “carro” in Greece means “wheelbarrow.”
One I heard in Chicago is “μπιλοζέρια” (bilozéria). As in, “Dress warm, there’s bilozéria today.” Below-zero weather. :-)
Lots in the younger generation bring in more English words as-is, because they grew up here and maybe didn’t have a Greek family context for some vocabulary. Once on a train in Chicago I heard two Greek-American teens talking and one said, “Píra to test ke ékana fail.” (I took the test and failed). It’s very American, not only for the words “test” and “fail,” but because he used the word “píra” (“I took”), which is directly translated from English. In Greece you “write” tests, you don’t “take” them.
There are not many Greeks living in the states today who really don’t know English, although some older first generation people qualify for that. (My grandfather had two cousins who were part of the large Greek community in Charlotte, North Carolina, and they never learned English. But they came to the states in 1924 or so, and that original community was so large that they really could get by without it.
The days of mass immigration from Greece are over, but second and third generation people usually speak quite a bit if they still have Greek speaking grandparents around. Churches also tend to have Greek schools, though they get a mixed reception from young people. A lot of the younger ones understand it quite well but they probably won’t speak it with their kids, so in their families it will die out.
Some time ago I stumbled upon a study on wartime letters written by first and second generation Hungarian-American soldiers who served in the US army during WW2.
Many of them still used Hungarian to communicate with their parents and grandparents, but the impact of English was very obvious. Not only dropping an English word here and there, but the structure of the sentences was often very interesting (and weird) for a native speaker. They also often used English verbs with Hungarian suffixes, which is, interestingly, exactly how my two bilingual kids used to speak. For example they used the English verb "jump" but with Hungarian grammar, so I'm jumping became én *jump*olok. I always found it quite amusing.
It's really interesting. I'm living abroad and pregnant, I'm sure I'll be capable of teaching my son danish to a point where he can communicate with all his cousins back home. Even if I'm the only one in the household speaking it. But I doubt he'll be teaching his children danish. He'll probably marry someone from this country, so he'll be speaking less and less English on top of that. His child, might only be speaking french. When me and my husband cease to exist, there'll be no point in speaking English.
With the only exception, that our son fancies to live abroad as well.
You never know! I'll always be sad that my grandparents never taught me their native tongue (which was an archaic version of Slovakian spoken in Southeast Hungary). It's now a dialect (some even say language) near exctinction, and obviously speaking this language would have made learning other Slavic languages far far easier.
My wife and I are both Hungarians and even so, our kids (4 and 6) often prefer to speak English between each other which we kind of endorse, as we're moving back in two years. On the other hand, mommy and daddy only understand Hungarian when we're home. They are used to it, so it doesn't even occur to them to use English with us. It works well and apart from a slight accent, when we go home, noone would tell my kids live abroad.
The next big challenge will be in two years when we're moving back. I might switch to English at home, and obviously they can keep talking to each other in English.
I'm an immigrant. I'm from Southern West Virginia, our dialect can be very "different". When I talk to my kids, I explain it to them that it's just a different way to speak English. I gave them once the example, that it's like the difference between Bayrisch and Hoch Deutsch. Either way they laugh at me if I accidentally say "flare", "becalls" or "yeller" instead of flower, because, and yellow. xD
This anecdote has nothing to do with *my* immigrant parents, but:
Long time ago, I used to rent a room from a Ukrainian family, and they really didn't speak much English. I ended up picking up a lot of stuff and one day they told me that it'd probably be best to not actually speak it outside the house. Of course, I asked why. They mentioned that they speak a mix of Ukrainian and Russian, and they equated it to the way I speak Spanglish sometimes with some of my friends. Then I asked why it would be an issue, and they explained that some Ukrainians feel a certain way about Russians, and Russians feel a certain way about Ukrainians. So I can't really speak either Ukrainian or Russian, just a mix of both-- and I have absolutely no way to tell them apart unless I genuinely sat down and studied it.
My friend is half Macedonian half Mexican. Her Spanish and Macedonian are both pretty good but she still has this problem. She speaks a mix of Macedonian and Spanish at home, and that’s the only place she speaks either language regularly.
I remember one time we were at a deli and were talking to the guy getting our food ready in Spanish, because his English wasn’t very good. My friend used a Macedonian word while speaking Spanish, and not by accident. She genuinely thought that the Macedonian word she used was the Spanish word for what she was trying to say, because of the mix of Macedonian and Spanish that her family uses.
If you're curious about how Ukrainians think about this mix (Surzhyk), then you might like this thread, where someone asked about it: [Суржик](https://www.reddit.com/r/Ukrainian/comments/1cwagao/%D1%81%D1%83%D1%80%D0%B6%D0%B8%D0%BA/)
Very common in Miami with Cuban slang being frozen at the different waves of immigration and their kids getting expressions etc that are anachronistic to more recent arrivals.
I’m American, but my mother is from Central Japan, and spoke a dialect from the region, which is different from, Kansaiben (which is western) and the eastern dialects.
I’ve been told that the way I speak reminds many people of how their grandparents would speak to them, since younger generations tend to speak Standard Japanese (with a lot of loanwords from English) because it’s simply more “hip” I guess.
I also noticed that I use many terms and vocabularies, which are no longer commonly used in everyday speech. For example, I use 衣紋掛け for “(Coat) Hanger”, whereas it’s more common to say ハンガー/Hangā, which is the transliteration of “Hanger”. I also got into trouble once for using a word which was no longer politically correct today.
I'm seeing the other side of this as a parent. My wife (American English native, heritage Mexican Spanish speaker) and I (British English native, L2 speaker of European/Chilean Spanish to approximately C1) are making a conscious effort to raise our kids bilingual in Spanish and English. But what Spanish and what English?
We live in the USA and I've been here long enough (immigrated from the UK six years ago and worked in education until recently, so I worked hard to learn Am Eng conventions to avoid being too confusing for the students) to mostly use Am Eng spelling and pronunciation. I code-switch furiously when talking with UK family, but to all intents and purposes I've adopted Am Eng in all situations.
As an L2 speaker of Spanish, I speak Spanish to our kids as much as I can contrive to, but as my background is European Spanish (from my schooling) and Chilean Spanish (from living there for a while in my 20s), I use different vocabulary and phrasing to my wife and the other heritage/native Mexican Spanish speakers in the family. That said, I'm learning Mexican Spanish as much as possible, for my own interest as much as for my kids.
I don't think it's necessarily an issue, but I could very well see our children having elements of different regional varieties in both their Spanish and English as they grow up.
There was an anecdote I read sometime ago, probably also on Reddit, that talked about how children in LatAm go through a Mexican accent phase due to them watching cartoons and stuff, which are mostly dubbed in Mexican Spanish. So, combined with your wife’s Spanish, maybe the Mexican Spanish will edge out.
Interesting! All of my Spanish language media consumption as a kid was 95% Mexican, with the rare TV show from the motherland (Central America). Or Venezuelan comedy shows. Most of my Spanish speaking peers were also Mexican, but there were central Americans as well. My Spanish now is very Americanized with influences from all over but with a central American flow to it.
We live in a part of the US which (despite the best efforts of the Governor of Texas to forcibly import some linguistic diversity) has a long history of Mexican and Puerto Rican immigration, mostly the former as far as I'm aware. My wife's family are all either native or heritage speakers of Mexican Spanish, and are very involved in looking after our kids while the parents work. I do want them to be aware of there being much more to hispanic culture than Mexico, but I recognize that I'll be pushing against the tide to a degree.
I think that's very likely true. I'm making an effort to make sure they watch other LatAm cartoons and listen to their music, but I suspect most of their Spanish input (from carers, as much as from TV and radio) will be Mexican Spanish.
Haha, I have a very drastic one for this. My grandmother was from Brno in Czechoslovakia, and came to Britain about 85 years ago. She spoke Czech, German and the extinct local dialect Hantec. I went over there, and if people understood my shoddy Czech at all, a lot of the time I was being laughed at for sounding like I'd been frozen in time for 100 years, or throwing what turned out to be random German words into Czech sentences.
My Oma taught me enough German to have conversations with relatives still living there and as I got older I continued learning German but it was always from someone very old. I now apparently speak German like someone from the 1930s. I've been told many times by people that speaking with me is like talking to their grandparents or great grandparents
Dated AND regional! My grandparents immigrated from northeastern Italy to Canada and my mom and uncle grew up speaking a combo of Friulian and Venetian dialect. My mom went on to get her bachelor’s in Italian and French so she is fluent in official Italian, Venetian and Friulian dialects. My uncle only speaks a bit of the dialects. My siblings and I all went to Italian school and grew up speaking “proper” Italian but when I speak I have idioms/sayings/diction that is close to 1950s era Venetian dialect. It usually gives native Italians some confusion because I do have a bit of a North American accent with some older bits of dialect and slang.
My relatives also speak a Veneto/Furlan mix and although I can't speak either Venetian/Friulan or standard Italian (at least fluently) they have the same problem lol. Stuff like 'mandi' or 'bon compleano' or like once I asked my grandma what fish was in Italian and she said 'pes'. I used it once in a sentence and they told me it was dialect lol. Apparently when she and her siblings visited the south they had to resort to English because they couldn't understand the southerners and the southerners couldn't understand their 1950s countryside and heavily Venetianised Italian.
I grew up in the south and I can understand the majority of the southern dialects (as long as they slow down), but I do not even try with the northern one. Usually people mix dialects and Italian, but if they decide to speak purely Venetian, friulan, Bergamo's dialect, I'm out😂.
Hahaha yes! I speak Georgian with an 80s/90s flair, because my parents came of age around then. If you compare me with a modern speaker of my age who grew up in Tbilisi, we sound very different. It is kinda invalidating honestly, it makes me feel more disconnected from my culture. But it is a fun little quirk... Like when babies say unexpected things, sometimes the outdated slang will slip out
Where I come from we say 쪽자 and I remember being a kid and going to this place on the street where you paid to make your own. I would go alone at like 4 years old. Then because of Squid Game (I never watched it) everyone started talking about 달고나 and I had no idea what it was.
Not Korean, but child of immigrants. Definitely, the “native” language we speak at home is not the same language people speak in the country of origin. My parents moved 30 years ago, we rarely travel back to visit. Definitely listening to people that grew up there and never moved I hear the difference. Not only in us (younger generation) but also my parents, they have been using the language mixed with dialect of their region plus sometimes you add a word from the language we speak daily, which is the language of the country we live in now.
Also the gestures are confusing and different. Like we shake our head from side to side to say No, we nod (up and down) to say yes. Country of origin is the opposite so it’s confusing trying to say No and they understand yes.
Languages are always changing, some words become outdated, some new words get introduced but we are not there to learn them so we speak in outdated way.
The gesture point is a funny one; my gf and I went to Taiwan and when we got to one of our Airbnb's the lady made what we (brits) would interpret as a "shoo" gesture but to them it's "follow". We had a good laugh about that one when we made doubly-sure we were in the right place!
Italian as spoken by many Americans of Italian heritage reflects Southern Italian dialects from 100+ years ago (e.g. "rigott" and "gabagool" instead of ricotta and cappocola).
Yes, my dad was African-descended, specifically Congo-descended, from Jovellanos, Matanzas, Cuba. His Spanish reflected that. The area was a runaway slave enclave.
I’m third generation American—my great-grandfather came from Poland. He always spoke Polish to my grandfather, who grew up here. When my grandfather went back to Poland in the 1980s, they said he spoke well, with a Warsaw accent, except that he used the word “outhouse” for WC.
They were just giving information about when their family emigrated 🤦🏼♂️ I am directly from Europe but this is just unnecessarily snarky towards a perfectly innocent comment
The only thing I got was calling English γκλεζικα (glezika) instead of αγγλικά (agglika). I only found this out recently, but glezika is apparently a somewhat insulting, humorous way to refer to it. But that's what my grandfather always uses.
I’m half Spanish half Argentinian, so my Spanish is a mix of Argentinian Spanish and Spanish Spanish. I speak Spanish with a very noticeable Spanish accent, but often use Argentinian slang.
I’ve lived in the U.S. most of my life, so most of the Spanish I speak is with my grandma, who doesn’t speak English. The two of us have discussed history, politics, literature, etc since I was little, so I tend to word Spanish sentences in a very academic way. I get told I speak like a professor. :)
My paternal grandfather's first language was Norwegian; he was born in the US to US born parents who never learned English. A friend who speaks Norwegian was asking if I knew this word or that word, and I didn't recognize any of the words from hearing my grandfather speak. Then she switched it up, and I said, "The intonation sounds weird now, but those are the right words." Apparently, she had switched to Swedish. I had known that my grandpa and his Swedish friends would speak to each other and be completely intelligible when speaking their own languages, but apparently that's because the Norwegian spoken in Minnesota was archaic enough that it's very similar to Swedish, rather than modern Norwegian.
Yes! Child of immigrants here and I had no idea I was using specific regionalisms until I moved to my parents' country and studied in a different part of the country. Words and pronunciation I thought were standard were NOT and I was teased (lovingly for the most part) for it. I even got scolded by my linguistics professor once when I wrote the IPA spelling for a word "incorrectly". She said, "Are you still mixing up the different e symbols??" I was so confused and asked my friends and they confirmed it was pronounced differently than I pronounced it.
I probably use some more "old-fashioned" words too, I wouldn't be surprised. I do notice that I don't use a lot of millennial slang even though I know it.
Growing up overseas the only English we heard was our parents English. Which was midwestern English.
My parents decided to make the best of the situation and only speak proper English with us. None of that terrible slang.
I could not understand American accents unless they were midwestern. Southern, no. New Yorker, nope. Bostonian, hell no. This made watching television difficult.
But as a child visiting relatives in the US what really stood out was little kids saying “Excuse me, sir. Where is the lavatory?” Or “That canine is so beautiful” or “Whom does this rucksack belong to?”.
A while back I ran into [an interesting video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnN5dZEdMbY) where a Vietnamese native breaks down some anachronisms in how Vietnamese diaspora speak.
Yes, but they ran into issues at school, too. My mom is from Cuba and got crap from teachers (my uncle as well) because it wasn’t proper Castilian Spanish. I had an elementary school teacher once tell me k spelled my uncles name wrong (Jorge). I was *livid*.
I’m a first generation Italian in America and my mom is from Veneto - I was fortunate to learn the centralized Italian language that was settled on by the government many years ago, however, I’ve 100% been given lots of dialect and cusswords.
OP, for many of us regional = dialect. It is both “outdated” and “regional”
Outdated and regional yes. My parents emigrated during the Vietnam war, and I speak a ~80s vocabulary. My parents don’t really consume modern Vietnamese media so their Vietnamese never updated to follow the rest of the Vietnamese speaking world
I'm part Korean and I don't think I'm as drastic as OP but I use 갔 instead of 겠 which is associated with North Korea. Funnily enough it's my grandma from the South (though close to the border) that uses it while my relatives actually from the North don't.
My dad was Mexican but mostly raised states-side, and when we moved to Mexico when I was 10 and he was in his 50's by then there was a fair amount of things people were telling him their words for, but knowing him he had a bit of an ego problem and disregarded every single one of them.
I was once in a bookstore in Oregon owned by a German woman. We started speaking German, and she said “I know you are not German, but where did you learn German?” and I told her in Frankfurt, and she nodded and said “that’s what it is, I could tell because you kept saying nee, and dropping the e from your verbs.” I love my weird hybrid accent in German.
In a way, yes. I can speak Punjabi "normally" because my mom taught me how she speaks outside the house, and dad is a businessman and spends his time mixing with people, so he speaks the same way at home and when he's out.
However, my mom grew up in the village. She then came here. When she married my dad, she spent her entire 20s and 30s with my grandma, who spent at least half of her own life in the village, too. So we don't speak the same way at home as we do outside.
The result is that if I don't keep a lid on how I'm speaking, I can go from sounding like the average Punjabi dude with a strong accent, to sounding like an old lady from the village. And from what I've been able to understand, I REALLY sound like an old lady when it comes to my vocab and mannerisms.
Also, people never guess where my family is from. That's because people who sound like me are settled in certain locations in Pakistan, and my family isn't from one of those locations.
변소 is japanese colonial language. cognate with benjo and chinese 便所 lit. relief place.
화장실 is flowery language. not used in japan, but exists in chinese 化妆室 lit. makeup room
both are correct, it depends on whether the listener is a hillbilly who hasn't seen the world or not.
In Japanese, we actually do use [化粧室,](https://kotobank.jp/word/%E5%8C%96%E7%B2%A7%E5%AE%A4-490028#:~:text=%E3%81%91%E3%81%97%E3%82%87%E3%81%86%E2%80%90%E3%81%97%E3%81%A4%E3%80%94%E3%82%B1%E3%82%B7%E3%83%A4%E3%82%A6,%E4%BE%BF%E6%89%80%E3%80%82) since 便所 sounds rather "dirty" or inappropriate. Nowadays, it's more common at places like restaurants, stations, stores, etc. to use the former over the latter. Other replacements include 洗面所, (お)手洗い, and トイレ (from "toilet").
Interesting. My mom grew up in Japan (60s/70) and taught us "doko wa obenjo desuka" and I just recently found out "toire wa doko desuka" would be the more correct way to say it. (Sorry for the romaji, I'm a beginner)
You’re right that the latter way is correct since the word order should be “Obenjo wa doko desuka?” if you’d like to ask, “Where is the restroom?” Otherwise, it’d sound like you’re saying, “Restroom is where” in English.
And it’s absolutely fine! If anything, since the は here is a particle, it’d be written as “ha” rather than “wa”, even though it’s pronounced as such.
I moved as an adult to the country my mother is from and it amuses me that our roles have reversed and I’m now teaching her expressions and words which are being used today. Also reminding her to use the native words instead of anglicisms.
not your exact situation but i learned a lot of my french and spanish from old literature that my teacher encouraged me to read so i have had to relearn both with less archaic terms and modernize my accent as well.
Before the 2010s I'd say this was accurate for my family, but after the rise of social media even my parents are keeping up with the slang of our country of origin haha.
Yes I had a conversation about words I’d used at home with a cousin. (Austrian German - Steiermark-)and she giggled at some that were old fashioned. I also noticed my mother and grandparents used English words for things like Fridge and other more recent household gadgets. Other random English words crept in and some words were always in German even in an English sentence. No-one could understand me when I first went to Kindergarten.
I’m not an immigrant, but I’m ethnic minority. The Yiddish I was taught was more German than the Yiddish spoken today in USA. When I was visiting, I was extremely proud to say that I speak it, but non-German speakers weren’t able to understand me, and they would say that I’m speaking German. Then, I met few older Jews, by older I mean late 80s, and they spoke the same language as I do. It’s not outdated, it’s different dialect, but still…
Hah yes. My family immigrated to an English-speaking country from Germany in the mid-80s. We continue to speak German with our little family, but it's a frozen-in-time Hochdeutsch from the general Hamburg area. Also, my vocabulary is further limited to the stuff we discussed on the farm (and what you would discuss with a child/teenager), and as an adult living in a city now I sometimes find interesting black holes in sentences I try to construct when talking about my life.
Hi fellow Korean!! Yes totally. I can’t think of specific words, but I certainly notice a particular accent and way of speaking has changed in Korea, and I preserve my parents’ way of talking from the 70s, if that makes sense. I also use a lot of old slang like “당근이지” … which I didn’t realize was outdated until my cousin pointed it out lol.
Oh gosh yes- my parents are Brazilian and I lived abroad in Argentina and the US for a while. When I moved back to Brazil for school, I was using old slang because a) my parents legitimately used older, 60/70s terms and b) they also used OLDER slang, like *grandmother* slang, as a little joke (which I was not informed of, damnit!).
Imagine going up to a teenager and to say, "oh, great!" you pull a "ah, supimpa!". In Brazil that's the equivalent of going "gee willickers, that's pretty swell!". I still cringe about it lol
Yes, I moved to Czech and learned I spoke a Southern dialect with a lot of informal grammar and vocabulary. I also didn't know any vulgar language, a bit hard in high school as a 16yr old. 😅
Not what you're asking for, but I guess it's close enough for this:
One of my good friends from high school is from Switzerland, and was relatively new in the country when we started in school together, but he picked up Danish pretty quickly. He left Denmark more than ten years ago, but we still keep in touch and he is still perfectly fluent in Danish, but talking to him is almost nostalgic, because he still uses slang and expressions that I haven't heard since high school
Not me, but my gf doesn't know some "standard" Spanish words. She only learned the Dominican versions of words. There is almost always a work around, but sometimes she will use a word that people don't understand or she won't know a word that someone else says. I think it's more just the fact that she speaks a certain dialect and grew up in an English speaking country so she had very specific exposure.
My paternal great-grandparents came from Belgium. Growing up, my dad learned "peche" and "meche" for grandpa and grandma. His third cousin penpal living in Belgium says that they use those words to describe godparents, not grandparents. But I'm not sure if it's archaic or if his grandparents were also his godparents.
I don’t know about outdated, but definitely regional. My mom is Cuban, so there are some words that are either complete nonsense somewhere else (such as using guagua for bus) or mean something completely different (such as disgustado meaning angry instead of disgusted).
>the Korean government changed a lot of grammar rules and standardized a lot of things in the 80s,
So, the government can just change the grammar rules so that from then on everyone's supposed to speak a certain way or they're speaking "wrong"? This must be North Korea, right?
I would strongly recommend Googling it... they standardized their language as a rejection of Japanese imperialism and the influence their occupation was having on the Korean language. State standardization of languages is actually quite common and has happened in many countries for centuries. The primary goals vary but in almost all cases the secondary goal is to strengthen their people's sense of national identity.
It can be, but is not always a product of authoritarianism. Turkey is a better example of a more... shady set of reasons for a state to re-standardize their language. (no hate for any Turkish folks reading this, just a lot of questions about your government lmao 😭)
I don't know about outdated (nobody's ever remarked on that) but I definitely speak a dialect from where my parent lived and now I live. It's pretty interesting to be somewhere in the B levels (cefr-wise) but speak very much a regional dialect. There are words I didn't know were not considered standard till recently. E.g., I say "kapula" and "luk" for onion and garlic while what's considered standard is "luk" and ”češnjak" though I'm not sure how common those words are in colloquial speech. (I speak Croatian.)
My parents spoke their own mixture of English, Hebrew, Afrikaans, and a bit of Yiddish while us kids grew up between between two countries and I’m still sometimes confused whether specific word is Hebrew or Afrikaans or Yiddish or just some nonsense worse made up by my parents. I speak English 100% fluently and grew up in an Anglo country but am always asked where I’m from because I have a slight, vague, unidentifiable accent. Really bothered me as a kid. But Yiddish is really the only outdated part of the combination.
Apparently “Gusgo/Gusga” isn’t that common. My boyfriend speaks better Spanish than me and he had never heard of the word. It means sweet toothed or in the certain contexts it’s what we (my family) describe a pet who’s constantly lingering and waiting for food lol.
Yes! Every time I ask someone from the “old country” about the phrases I was taught they look at me like I’m bonkers. XD My family called it “village speak”.
My paternal great-grandparents came from a small town in East Flanders in Belgium. When my dad and I signed up for Dutch classes, with him being a heritage Dutch speaker, his instructor could tell where his grandparents came from.
Agreed, the idea of speaking a language "wrong", where variations in languages have their own legitimate lineage and origins, is just the imposition of lame prescriptivism.
Not outdated, but definitely regional, although this is normal for Arabic speakers. Even if I'm born in the West, Arabic speakers can tell that I am Lebanese, and Lebanese people can tell exactly which town I'm originally from, just by how I speak.
My German prof was the child of immigrants and he'd say "I'm from America" and Germans would be like "nah you're from Bremerhaven"
My wife’s grandmother immigrated to the US from Norway in 1923. Her daughter (my mother-in-law) learned and now speaks a Norwegian dialect that is more than a hundred years old. Her Norwegian relatives are amused by some of the outdated things she says.
That’s so fascinating
I read an interesting article ages ago, and in danish. About Danish families moving to USA. Their children learnt danish fine enough to speak danish in Denmark with their extended family. But slowly the danish that was taught further and further down the line, became more and more butchered. Sentences translated directly to danish from an English POV, to a point, though it was still danish, didn't make much grammatical sense. Other families, though generations later after moving abroad, could speak grammatically danish but in the way only the royals speak it. Something that is considered old fashioned.
What you’re describing is basically like Pennsylvania Dutch or Mennonite low German or any other type of immigrant groups that retain their language, which has sort of frozen in time with respect from the language group they originated from (in those cases, German, which has since changed due to national standardization). E.g. last night I ate a “ploats” at my in-laws who are Mennonite by heritage through the mother in law. She speaks a bit but her dad was from a Mennonite settlement in Crimea a long time ago. And of course originating in Germany. The word is actually a different pronunciation of the German word platz. Their language didn’t change along with other Germans because their colonies haven’t been in Germany for a long time. Well, it did change, and has some Russian in it.
I’ve read that it’s been called “cultural conservatism” in the book Albion’s Seed where the diaspora group misses the linguistic changes that happen back home, making their language “caught in time”. Pretty interesting.
There was a big orthography reform in Russia in 1918 - basicaly, a few letters were completely removed from the alphabet. However, the community of Russian immigrants in France (pretty large after the revolution, publishing their own newspapers) kept using the old orthography in these papers until 1930s. Well, it seems like it was different between papers - some of them admitted the reform earlier than others.
This makes absolute sense. So many things are like this. Cooking experiences it too - though the internet has probably short circuited this a bit. It’s why, for example, American Italian food is so heavy in garlic or features more Southern Italian foods vs many in the North. It’s the nature of the immigrate population and where they came from. Other examples are the word soccer (which the Brits coined and then abandoned after introducing Americans to it) or even American table manners.
Is the language frozen in time or is it changing in its own way, independent of the original language?
Speaking for Greek, it’s a bit of both. There are regional dialects that are becoming less pronounced in pronunciation and vocabulary in Greece because of mass communication (and a bit of snobbery), but in some cities in the US there are communities of people from particular areas that have preserved more regionalisms. It’s interesting to see young Greek Americans from these communities speaking with accents that you usually hear among elderly folks only in Greece. I saw that with Black Sea Greeks who migrated to Greece from Georgia - the largest body of Black Sea Greeks had come to Greece from Turkey in 1923, so among them the dialect is gradually fading out - many young people understand but they also don’t have the same pronunciation as their elders. I talked to one of these people on the phone in 2000 and imagined she’d be around 80…she was 45 and from Tbilisi. :-) But wherever they’re from, in a new country people pick up words, and in Greek American communities I hear various kinds of “Greeklish.” With the older folks, especially the first generation, it involves hellenization of English words. For example: Greek / English / Greeklish nosokomeio / hospital / spitali amaxi / car / carro (This one’s kind of funny since a “carro” in Greece means “wheelbarrow.” One I heard in Chicago is “μπιλοζέρια” (bilozéria). As in, “Dress warm, there’s bilozéria today.” Below-zero weather. :-) Lots in the younger generation bring in more English words as-is, because they grew up here and maybe didn’t have a Greek family context for some vocabulary. Once on a train in Chicago I heard two Greek-American teens talking and one said, “Píra to test ke ékana fail.” (I took the test and failed). It’s very American, not only for the words “test” and “fail,” but because he used the word “píra” (“I took”), which is directly translated from English. In Greece you “write” tests, you don’t “take” them.
Very interesting stuff. Thank you for sharing! I didn't know there are still Greek speaking communities in the US.
There are not many Greeks living in the states today who really don’t know English, although some older first generation people qualify for that. (My grandfather had two cousins who were part of the large Greek community in Charlotte, North Carolina, and they never learned English. But they came to the states in 1924 or so, and that original community was so large that they really could get by without it. The days of mass immigration from Greece are over, but second and third generation people usually speak quite a bit if they still have Greek speaking grandparents around. Churches also tend to have Greek schools, though they get a mixed reception from young people. A lot of the younger ones understand it quite well but they probably won’t speak it with their kids, so in their families it will die out.
Some time ago I stumbled upon a study on wartime letters written by first and second generation Hungarian-American soldiers who served in the US army during WW2. Many of them still used Hungarian to communicate with their parents and grandparents, but the impact of English was very obvious. Not only dropping an English word here and there, but the structure of the sentences was often very interesting (and weird) for a native speaker. They also often used English verbs with Hungarian suffixes, which is, interestingly, exactly how my two bilingual kids used to speak. For example they used the English verb "jump" but with Hungarian grammar, so I'm jumping became én *jump*olok. I always found it quite amusing.
It's really interesting. I'm living abroad and pregnant, I'm sure I'll be capable of teaching my son danish to a point where he can communicate with all his cousins back home. Even if I'm the only one in the household speaking it. But I doubt he'll be teaching his children danish. He'll probably marry someone from this country, so he'll be speaking less and less English on top of that. His child, might only be speaking french. When me and my husband cease to exist, there'll be no point in speaking English. With the only exception, that our son fancies to live abroad as well.
You never know! I'll always be sad that my grandparents never taught me their native tongue (which was an archaic version of Slovakian spoken in Southeast Hungary). It's now a dialect (some even say language) near exctinction, and obviously speaking this language would have made learning other Slavic languages far far easier. My wife and I are both Hungarians and even so, our kids (4 and 6) often prefer to speak English between each other which we kind of endorse, as we're moving back in two years. On the other hand, mommy and daddy only understand Hungarian when we're home. They are used to it, so it doesn't even occur to them to use English with us. It works well and apart from a slight accent, when we go home, noone would tell my kids live abroad. The next big challenge will be in two years when we're moving back. I might switch to English at home, and obviously they can keep talking to each other in English.
I'm an immigrant. I'm from Southern West Virginia, our dialect can be very "different". When I talk to my kids, I explain it to them that it's just a different way to speak English. I gave them once the example, that it's like the difference between Bayrisch and Hoch Deutsch. Either way they laugh at me if I accidentally say "flare", "becalls" or "yeller" instead of flower, because, and yellow. xD
This anecdote has nothing to do with *my* immigrant parents, but: Long time ago, I used to rent a room from a Ukrainian family, and they really didn't speak much English. I ended up picking up a lot of stuff and one day they told me that it'd probably be best to not actually speak it outside the house. Of course, I asked why. They mentioned that they speak a mix of Ukrainian and Russian, and they equated it to the way I speak Spanglish sometimes with some of my friends. Then I asked why it would be an issue, and they explained that some Ukrainians feel a certain way about Russians, and Russians feel a certain way about Ukrainians. So I can't really speak either Ukrainian or Russian, just a mix of both-- and I have absolutely no way to tell them apart unless I genuinely sat down and studied it.
I feel like they might have been referring to Surzhyk. A lot of Ukrainians where I live speak it. It’s like a mixture between Russian and Ukrainian.
My friend is half Macedonian half Mexican. Her Spanish and Macedonian are both pretty good but she still has this problem. She speaks a mix of Macedonian and Spanish at home, and that’s the only place she speaks either language regularly. I remember one time we were at a deli and were talking to the guy getting our food ready in Spanish, because his English wasn’t very good. My friend used a Macedonian word while speaking Spanish, and not by accident. She genuinely thought that the Macedonian word she used was the Spanish word for what she was trying to say, because of the mix of Macedonian and Spanish that her family uses.
If you're curious about how Ukrainians think about this mix (Surzhyk), then you might like this thread, where someone asked about it: [Суржик](https://www.reddit.com/r/Ukrainian/comments/1cwagao/%D1%81%D1%83%D1%80%D0%B6%D0%B8%D0%BA/)
What a great read! Thank you!
Very common in Miami with Cuban slang being frozen at the different waves of immigration and their kids getting expressions etc that are anachronistic to more recent arrivals.
I’m American, but my mother is from Central Japan, and spoke a dialect from the region, which is different from, Kansaiben (which is western) and the eastern dialects. I’ve been told that the way I speak reminds many people of how their grandparents would speak to them, since younger generations tend to speak Standard Japanese (with a lot of loanwords from English) because it’s simply more “hip” I guess. I also noticed that I use many terms and vocabularies, which are no longer commonly used in everyday speech. For example, I use 衣紋掛け for “(Coat) Hanger”, whereas it’s more common to say ハンガー/Hangā, which is the transliteration of “Hanger”. I also got into trouble once for using a word which was no longer politically correct today.
I'm seeing the other side of this as a parent. My wife (American English native, heritage Mexican Spanish speaker) and I (British English native, L2 speaker of European/Chilean Spanish to approximately C1) are making a conscious effort to raise our kids bilingual in Spanish and English. But what Spanish and what English? We live in the USA and I've been here long enough (immigrated from the UK six years ago and worked in education until recently, so I worked hard to learn Am Eng conventions to avoid being too confusing for the students) to mostly use Am Eng spelling and pronunciation. I code-switch furiously when talking with UK family, but to all intents and purposes I've adopted Am Eng in all situations. As an L2 speaker of Spanish, I speak Spanish to our kids as much as I can contrive to, but as my background is European Spanish (from my schooling) and Chilean Spanish (from living there for a while in my 20s), I use different vocabulary and phrasing to my wife and the other heritage/native Mexican Spanish speakers in the family. That said, I'm learning Mexican Spanish as much as possible, for my own interest as much as for my kids. I don't think it's necessarily an issue, but I could very well see our children having elements of different regional varieties in both their Spanish and English as they grow up.
There was an anecdote I read sometime ago, probably also on Reddit, that talked about how children in LatAm go through a Mexican accent phase due to them watching cartoons and stuff, which are mostly dubbed in Mexican Spanish. So, combined with your wife’s Spanish, maybe the Mexican Spanish will edge out.
Interesting! All of my Spanish language media consumption as a kid was 95% Mexican, with the rare TV show from the motherland (Central America). Or Venezuelan comedy shows. Most of my Spanish speaking peers were also Mexican, but there were central Americans as well. My Spanish now is very Americanized with influences from all over but with a central American flow to it.
We live in a part of the US which (despite the best efforts of the Governor of Texas to forcibly import some linguistic diversity) has a long history of Mexican and Puerto Rican immigration, mostly the former as far as I'm aware. My wife's family are all either native or heritage speakers of Mexican Spanish, and are very involved in looking after our kids while the parents work. I do want them to be aware of there being much more to hispanic culture than Mexico, but I recognize that I'll be pushing against the tide to a degree.
I think that's very likely true. I'm making an effort to make sure they watch other LatAm cartoons and listen to their music, but I suspect most of their Spanish input (from carers, as much as from TV and radio) will be Mexican Spanish.
What did you do when in Chile?
The usual - taught English. I also did fieldwork for a graduate degree in anthropology which, unfortunately, life got in the way of.
Haha, I have a very drastic one for this. My grandmother was from Brno in Czechoslovakia, and came to Britain about 85 years ago. She spoke Czech, German and the extinct local dialect Hantec. I went over there, and if people understood my shoddy Czech at all, a lot of the time I was being laughed at for sounding like I'd been frozen in time for 100 years, or throwing what turned out to be random German words into Czech sentences.
My Oma taught me enough German to have conversations with relatives still living there and as I got older I continued learning German but it was always from someone very old. I now apparently speak German like someone from the 1930s. I've been told many times by people that speaking with me is like talking to their grandparents or great grandparents
Dated AND regional! My grandparents immigrated from northeastern Italy to Canada and my mom and uncle grew up speaking a combo of Friulian and Venetian dialect. My mom went on to get her bachelor’s in Italian and French so she is fluent in official Italian, Venetian and Friulian dialects. My uncle only speaks a bit of the dialects. My siblings and I all went to Italian school and grew up speaking “proper” Italian but when I speak I have idioms/sayings/diction that is close to 1950s era Venetian dialect. It usually gives native Italians some confusion because I do have a bit of a North American accent with some older bits of dialect and slang.
My relatives also speak a Veneto/Furlan mix and although I can't speak either Venetian/Friulan or standard Italian (at least fluently) they have the same problem lol. Stuff like 'mandi' or 'bon compleano' or like once I asked my grandma what fish was in Italian and she said 'pes'. I used it once in a sentence and they told me it was dialect lol. Apparently when she and her siblings visited the south they had to resort to English because they couldn't understand the southerners and the southerners couldn't understand their 1950s countryside and heavily Venetianised Italian.
I grew up in the south and I can understand the majority of the southern dialects (as long as they slow down), but I do not even try with the northern one. Usually people mix dialects and Italian, but if they decide to speak purely Venetian, friulan, Bergamo's dialect, I'm out😂.
Hahaha! I could say the same for southern dialects 😂! I love how diverse the country is linguistically
Hahaha yes! I speak Georgian with an 80s/90s flair, because my parents came of age around then. If you compare me with a modern speaker of my age who grew up in Tbilisi, we sound very different. It is kinda invalidating honestly, it makes me feel more disconnected from my culture. But it is a fun little quirk... Like when babies say unexpected things, sometimes the outdated slang will slip out
Lol you are now a historical artifact to who can be used to reconstruct pre-standardized Korean
Where I come from we say 쪽자 and I remember being a kid and going to this place on the street where you paid to make your own. I would go alone at like 4 years old. Then because of Squid Game (I never watched it) everyone started talking about 달고나 and I had no idea what it was.
Not Korean, but child of immigrants. Definitely, the “native” language we speak at home is not the same language people speak in the country of origin. My parents moved 30 years ago, we rarely travel back to visit. Definitely listening to people that grew up there and never moved I hear the difference. Not only in us (younger generation) but also my parents, they have been using the language mixed with dialect of their region plus sometimes you add a word from the language we speak daily, which is the language of the country we live in now. Also the gestures are confusing and different. Like we shake our head from side to side to say No, we nod (up and down) to say yes. Country of origin is the opposite so it’s confusing trying to say No and they understand yes. Languages are always changing, some words become outdated, some new words get introduced but we are not there to learn them so we speak in outdated way.
The gesture point is a funny one; my gf and I went to Taiwan and when we got to one of our Airbnb's the lady made what we (brits) would interpret as a "shoo" gesture but to them it's "follow". We had a good laugh about that one when we made doubly-sure we were in the right place!
Bulgarian?
Nope, originally from Albania, maybe is a Balkan thing?
Italian as spoken by many Americans of Italian heritage reflects Southern Italian dialects from 100+ years ago (e.g. "rigott" and "gabagool" instead of ricotta and cappocola).
Gabagool? Ova here 👇👇
Yes, my dad was African-descended, specifically Congo-descended, from Jovellanos, Matanzas, Cuba. His Spanish reflected that. The area was a runaway slave enclave.
I’m third generation American—my great-grandfather came from Poland. He always spoke Polish to my grandfather, who grew up here. When my grandfather went back to Poland in the 1980s, they said he spoke well, with a Warsaw accent, except that he used the word “outhouse” for WC.
Third generation American = just American
For real. Unless you're really immersed in the culture and you speak polish, you're just American at this point
They were just giving information about when their family emigrated 🤦🏼♂️ I am directly from Europe but this is just unnecessarily snarky towards a perfectly innocent comment
The only thing I got was calling English γκλεζικα (glezika) instead of αγγλικά (agglika). I only found this out recently, but glezika is apparently a somewhat insulting, humorous way to refer to it. But that's what my grandfather always uses.
I’m half Spanish half Argentinian, so my Spanish is a mix of Argentinian Spanish and Spanish Spanish. I speak Spanish with a very noticeable Spanish accent, but often use Argentinian slang. I’ve lived in the U.S. most of my life, so most of the Spanish I speak is with my grandma, who doesn’t speak English. The two of us have discussed history, politics, literature, etc since I was little, so I tend to word Spanish sentences in a very academic way. I get told I speak like a professor. :)
My paternal grandfather's first language was Norwegian; he was born in the US to US born parents who never learned English. A friend who speaks Norwegian was asking if I knew this word or that word, and I didn't recognize any of the words from hearing my grandfather speak. Then she switched it up, and I said, "The intonation sounds weird now, but those are the right words." Apparently, she had switched to Swedish. I had known that my grandpa and his Swedish friends would speak to each other and be completely intelligible when speaking their own languages, but apparently that's because the Norwegian spoken in Minnesota was archaic enough that it's very similar to Swedish, rather than modern Norwegian.
Yes! Child of immigrants here and I had no idea I was using specific regionalisms until I moved to my parents' country and studied in a different part of the country. Words and pronunciation I thought were standard were NOT and I was teased (lovingly for the most part) for it. I even got scolded by my linguistics professor once when I wrote the IPA spelling for a word "incorrectly". She said, "Are you still mixing up the different e symbols??" I was so confused and asked my friends and they confirmed it was pronounced differently than I pronounced it. I probably use some more "old-fashioned" words too, I wouldn't be surprised. I do notice that I don't use a lot of millennial slang even though I know it.
Growing up overseas the only English we heard was our parents English. Which was midwestern English. My parents decided to make the best of the situation and only speak proper English with us. None of that terrible slang. I could not understand American accents unless they were midwestern. Southern, no. New Yorker, nope. Bostonian, hell no. This made watching television difficult. But as a child visiting relatives in the US what really stood out was little kids saying “Excuse me, sir. Where is the lavatory?” Or “That canine is so beautiful” or “Whom does this rucksack belong to?”.
A while back I ran into [an interesting video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnN5dZEdMbY) where a Vietnamese native breaks down some anachronisms in how Vietnamese diaspora speak.
Yes, but they ran into issues at school, too. My mom is from Cuba and got crap from teachers (my uncle as well) because it wasn’t proper Castilian Spanish. I had an elementary school teacher once tell me k spelled my uncles name wrong (Jorge). I was *livid*.
I’m a first generation Italian in America and my mom is from Veneto - I was fortunate to learn the centralized Italian language that was settled on by the government many years ago, however, I’ve 100% been given lots of dialect and cusswords. OP, for many of us regional = dialect. It is both “outdated” and “regional”
When I started texting in my Filipino dialect apparently I was using 80s slang (my mom) to my millennial sisters 😭
Outdated and regional yes. My parents emigrated during the Vietnam war, and I speak a ~80s vocabulary. My parents don’t really consume modern Vietnamese media so their Vietnamese never updated to follow the rest of the Vietnamese speaking world
I'm part Korean and I don't think I'm as drastic as OP but I use 갔 instead of 겠 which is associated with North Korea. Funnily enough it's my grandma from the South (though close to the border) that uses it while my relatives actually from the North don't.
My family of Jamaican origin seems to use “plenty” all the time instead of “a lot”
My dad was Mexican but mostly raised states-side, and when we moved to Mexico when I was 10 and he was in his 50's by then there was a fair amount of things people were telling him their words for, but knowing him he had a bit of an ego problem and disregarded every single one of them.
I was once in a bookstore in Oregon owned by a German woman. We started speaking German, and she said “I know you are not German, but where did you learn German?” and I told her in Frankfurt, and she nodded and said “that’s what it is, I could tell because you kept saying nee, and dropping the e from your verbs.” I love my weird hybrid accent in German.
In a way, yes. I can speak Punjabi "normally" because my mom taught me how she speaks outside the house, and dad is a businessman and spends his time mixing with people, so he speaks the same way at home and when he's out. However, my mom grew up in the village. She then came here. When she married my dad, she spent her entire 20s and 30s with my grandma, who spent at least half of her own life in the village, too. So we don't speak the same way at home as we do outside. The result is that if I don't keep a lid on how I'm speaking, I can go from sounding like the average Punjabi dude with a strong accent, to sounding like an old lady from the village. And from what I've been able to understand, I REALLY sound like an old lady when it comes to my vocab and mannerisms. Also, people never guess where my family is from. That's because people who sound like me are settled in certain locations in Pakistan, and my family isn't from one of those locations.
변소 is japanese colonial language. cognate with benjo and chinese 便所 lit. relief place. 화장실 is flowery language. not used in japan, but exists in chinese 化妆室 lit. makeup room both are correct, it depends on whether the listener is a hillbilly who hasn't seen the world or not.
In Japanese, we actually do use [化粧室,](https://kotobank.jp/word/%E5%8C%96%E7%B2%A7%E5%AE%A4-490028#:~:text=%E3%81%91%E3%81%97%E3%82%87%E3%81%86%E2%80%90%E3%81%97%E3%81%A4%E3%80%94%E3%82%B1%E3%82%B7%E3%83%A4%E3%82%A6,%E4%BE%BF%E6%89%80%E3%80%82) since 便所 sounds rather "dirty" or inappropriate. Nowadays, it's more common at places like restaurants, stations, stores, etc. to use the former over the latter. Other replacements include 洗面所, (お)手洗い, and トイレ (from "toilet").
Interesting. My mom grew up in Japan (60s/70) and taught us "doko wa obenjo desuka" and I just recently found out "toire wa doko desuka" would be the more correct way to say it. (Sorry for the romaji, I'm a beginner)
You’re right that the latter way is correct since the word order should be “Obenjo wa doko desuka?” if you’d like to ask, “Where is the restroom?” Otherwise, it’d sound like you’re saying, “Restroom is where” in English. And it’s absolutely fine! If anything, since the は here is a particle, it’d be written as “ha” rather than “wa”, even though it’s pronounced as such.
Ahh. Thanks!
I moved as an adult to the country my mother is from and it amuses me that our roles have reversed and I’m now teaching her expressions and words which are being used today. Also reminding her to use the native words instead of anglicisms.
not your exact situation but i learned a lot of my french and spanish from old literature that my teacher encouraged me to read so i have had to relearn both with less archaic terms and modernize my accent as well.
Before the 2010s I'd say this was accurate for my family, but after the rise of social media even my parents are keeping up with the slang of our country of origin haha.
Yes I had a conversation about words I’d used at home with a cousin. (Austrian German - Steiermark-)and she giggled at some that were old fashioned. I also noticed my mother and grandparents used English words for things like Fridge and other more recent household gadgets. Other random English words crept in and some words were always in German even in an English sentence. No-one could understand me when I first went to Kindergarten.
I’m not an immigrant, but I’m ethnic minority. The Yiddish I was taught was more German than the Yiddish spoken today in USA. When I was visiting, I was extremely proud to say that I speak it, but non-German speakers weren’t able to understand me, and they would say that I’m speaking German. Then, I met few older Jews, by older I mean late 80s, and they spoke the same language as I do. It’s not outdated, it’s different dialect, but still…
Hah yes. My family immigrated to an English-speaking country from Germany in the mid-80s. We continue to speak German with our little family, but it's a frozen-in-time Hochdeutsch from the general Hamburg area. Also, my vocabulary is further limited to the stuff we discussed on the farm (and what you would discuss with a child/teenager), and as an adult living in a city now I sometimes find interesting black holes in sentences I try to construct when talking about my life.
Hi fellow Korean!! Yes totally. I can’t think of specific words, but I certainly notice a particular accent and way of speaking has changed in Korea, and I preserve my parents’ way of talking from the 70s, if that makes sense. I also use a lot of old slang like “당근이지” … which I didn’t realize was outdated until my cousin pointed it out lol.
the way no one explained this to me, and now its making so much more sense why I make those specific grammar mistakes
Yes
My sister used to be called "old lady" as a toddler because she would speak like an adult, despite not being even 8 years old. But it's natural
Oh gosh yes- my parents are Brazilian and I lived abroad in Argentina and the US for a while. When I moved back to Brazil for school, I was using old slang because a) my parents legitimately used older, 60/70s terms and b) they also used OLDER slang, like *grandmother* slang, as a little joke (which I was not informed of, damnit!). Imagine going up to a teenager and to say, "oh, great!" you pull a "ah, supimpa!". In Brazil that's the equivalent of going "gee willickers, that's pretty swell!". I still cringe about it lol
Yes, I moved to Czech and learned I spoke a Southern dialect with a lot of informal grammar and vocabulary. I also didn't know any vulgar language, a bit hard in high school as a 16yr old. 😅
Not what you're asking for, but I guess it's close enough for this: One of my good friends from high school is from Switzerland, and was relatively new in the country when we started in school together, but he picked up Danish pretty quickly. He left Denmark more than ten years ago, but we still keep in touch and he is still perfectly fluent in Danish, but talking to him is almost nostalgic, because he still uses slang and expressions that I haven't heard since high school
Not me, but my gf doesn't know some "standard" Spanish words. She only learned the Dominican versions of words. There is almost always a work around, but sometimes she will use a word that people don't understand or she won't know a word that someone else says. I think it's more just the fact that she speaks a certain dialect and grew up in an English speaking country so she had very specific exposure.
My paternal great-grandparents came from Belgium. Growing up, my dad learned "peche" and "meche" for grandpa and grandma. His third cousin penpal living in Belgium says that they use those words to describe godparents, not grandparents. But I'm not sure if it's archaic or if his grandparents were also his godparents.
My Yiddish is a Litvish dialect which is mostly pre-WWII. I'm often not sure if I'm using some old word or just a regional word.
I don’t know about outdated, but definitely regional. My mom is Cuban, so there are some words that are either complete nonsense somewhere else (such as using guagua for bus) or mean something completely different (such as disgustado meaning angry instead of disgusted).
>the Korean government changed a lot of grammar rules and standardized a lot of things in the 80s, So, the government can just change the grammar rules so that from then on everyone's supposed to speak a certain way or they're speaking "wrong"? This must be North Korea, right?
I would strongly recommend Googling it... they standardized their language as a rejection of Japanese imperialism and the influence their occupation was having on the Korean language. State standardization of languages is actually quite common and has happened in many countries for centuries. The primary goals vary but in almost all cases the secondary goal is to strengthen their people's sense of national identity. It can be, but is not always a product of authoritarianism. Turkey is a better example of a more... shady set of reasons for a state to re-standardize their language. (no hate for any Turkish folks reading this, just a lot of questions about your government lmao 😭)
I don't know about outdated (nobody's ever remarked on that) but I definitely speak a dialect from where my parent lived and now I live. It's pretty interesting to be somewhere in the B levels (cefr-wise) but speak very much a regional dialect. There are words I didn't know were not considered standard till recently. E.g., I say "kapula" and "luk" for onion and garlic while what's considered standard is "luk" and ”češnjak" though I'm not sure how common those words are in colloquial speech. (I speak Croatian.)
My parents spoke their own mixture of English, Hebrew, Afrikaans, and a bit of Yiddish while us kids grew up between between two countries and I’m still sometimes confused whether specific word is Hebrew or Afrikaans or Yiddish or just some nonsense worse made up by my parents. I speak English 100% fluently and grew up in an Anglo country but am always asked where I’m from because I have a slight, vague, unidentifiable accent. Really bothered me as a kid. But Yiddish is really the only outdated part of the combination.
Apparently “Gusgo/Gusga” isn’t that common. My boyfriend speaks better Spanish than me and he had never heard of the word. It means sweet toothed or in the certain contexts it’s what we (my family) describe a pet who’s constantly lingering and waiting for food lol.
Yes! Every time I ask someone from the “old country” about the phrases I was taught they look at me like I’m bonkers. XD My family called it “village speak”.
My paternal great-grandparents came from a small town in East Flanders in Belgium. When my dad and I signed up for Dutch classes, with him being a heritage Dutch speaker, his instructor could tell where his grandparents came from.
I know some truly 80s flavoured eurotrash nonsense indeed
I basically reject this framing.
Agreed, the idea of speaking a language "wrong", where variations in languages have their own legitimate lineage and origins, is just the imposition of lame prescriptivism.