Member Countries and Known Languages

[Zju]

We’re talking about phonemes, and the reduction of unstressed /ɛ/ to [ə] is not present in all dialects (some Southern dialects don’t do it, for instance).

So which one is original? I've left with the impression that unstressed vowels in Proto-Germanic either dropped or reduced to [ə] and only later some dialects secondarily shifted it to [ɛ] or [e]. Did unstressed vowels somehow reduce to [ɛ] instead?

[Jonlang]

I'm from Chester, UK. Between the ages of ten and eleven, I lived in a trailer, and now I live in a single room in Manchester.

I speak fluent English and Hebrew, my French is steadily worsening, and I have more or less conversational knowledge of a few other languages (at the moment Persian and Russian are my strongest). I've been told I have an Israeli accent in English, a Hebrew accent in Russian, and a French accent in Hebrew, so I probably sound a bit funny in every language, but my native dialect is some sort of North West English crossed with a bit of Estuary.

I'm from South Wales, living in North Wales. I'm not that far from Chester... or Caer It's a beautiful city.

[Frislander]

I'm living in North Yorkshire but my family is half from County Durham and half from Mersyside, and I generally consider myself to be "Northern".

As for languages, I'm native English speaker and did French and German at school (though they seem to be crap at getting you fluent at GCSE). Some of my mum's side of the family live and in some cases grew up in Germany, so I'd say that that's my stronger foreign language, though I'm still not fluent or near fluency.

[Nooj]

Im korean australian kiwi. I was born in south korea and left as a child.

My korean has deteriorated to deplorable levels.i can speak and listen but I imagine many learners are better than me. My mother is from gyeongsang and speaks that dialect. My dad speaks standard as far as I can tell.

I live in Spain and have done so for the last 9 months. I speak spanish 'well' but I feel like I'd need 9 years here to be as good at it as I am with english. I soeak, read and write spanish all day every day. i know no english speaker here (and i keep it that way). I speak a variety of central spanish but I am in desperate love with andalucian varieties.

I speak english of the australian sort but strangely not very australian, vowels are all australian but its rhotic, taking after the americans. I donno why I speak like that. Lost the kiwi accent soon after coming to aus.

I also speak french thanks to a buttload of French friends. Madly in love with the south varieties, like aix en province. Worse than my Spanish now because i dont need to use it but just a couple of days ago I had a nice convo with a person from mayotte so I know it works.

I learned persian in uni for a couple of months and exchanged persian for korean with an iranian friend here in spain. But its shit - i focused everything on spanish. My solid determinatiom is to go live in iran one day very soon and learn it. Some of her damily is from shiraz and I love the fuck out of that dialect.

Im going to go live in Morocco soon. I want to learn darija and modern standard arabic there. My plan is to stay the fuck away from foreigners as much as I can. Maybe even a berber language (bestill my beating heart).

I learned latin in school and though im rusty i can still make a good accounting of myself reading cicero or seneca. I Need better time management man.

I have a major in ancient greek from university. Haven't read a greek text in months but its considerably easier to me than Latin, except medieval greek because that just confuses me. I also learned sanskrit in uni but all I retain now is the devanagari. When I go back home to aus imma learn it for reals, do my degree in indian literature and read kalidasa - thats my dream.

[Vijay]

read kalidasa - thats my dream.

That sounds like the dream. I know stories about Kalidasa but have never read any of his actual works before.

[Fimi]

I'm from a small German town and I speak, well, German. I also understand Low German to some degree (even though I never listened to it on a regular basis, because I moved at young age to another state in Germany where the old people spoke a totally different dialect of, what I think, is actually Franconian (?)). I speak English with the distinctly non-distinct accent of someone who learned (or rather tried to learn) RP in school, but nowadays mostly listens to Americans ... it's probably a big mess I also studied various languages (Finnish, Japanese, Swedish, Italian), but I'm nowhere near a level where I could comfortably communicate in any of those languages. That's the curse of conlangers, isn't it? Oh, and I had Latin in school, if that counts as a langauge the way they teach it ...