Your Native Language

[User]

Dutch, ancestors are Limburg...ian?

[Drydic]

You seem like a pretty cool dude. Let's be friends.

Thank you. Though, through the years, I've found people like me more for my Dravidian languages than for my personality.

Well, at the moment, we don't know your personality, so all we have to go on are the Dravidian languages. Here's to hoping that changes. :clinks glass:

[Latinist13]

Native: English
Mother toungues: Plaudietsch (Low German, my dad calls it Swiebisch, although I am not sure if I got the correct spelling), Norwegian, and Russian.

[Rui]

Mother toungues: Plaudietsch (Low German, my dad calls it Swiebisch, although I am not sure if I got the correct spelling)

That sounds an awful lot like Schwäbisch, which is not actually Low German, but a variety of Alemannic, an Upper German variety. Do you know where, geographically, your family who speaks/spoke this language comes from?

[Latinist13]

Mother toungues: Plaudietsch (Low German, my dad calls it Swiebisch, although I am not sure if I got the correct spelling)

That sounds an awful lot like Schwäbisch, which is not actually Low German, but a variety of Alemannic, an Upper German variety. Do you know where, geographically, your family who speaks/spoke this language comes from?

My dad refers to it (his dialect) as a Low German dialect, apparently very different from the High German taught in the schools. He grew up in South Central North Dakota, Macintosh County, where there is a sizeable Germans from Russia population. He is full blooded German and speaks the language as his first language. His side of the family immigrated to the United States from Russia in the 1880s-1890s, or thereabouts. He describes the dialect he speaks as having tons of slang terms, colloquialisms, and figurative language, along with several loan words from Russian and English, thus somebody who learned "textbook German" would be completely lost trying to converse with him after a relatively short period of time.

[Rui]

Does your dad actually know the difference between Low German (spoken in northern Germany) and High German (spoken in the rest of Germany, Switzerland, and Austria), or is he just saying "low" to mean "substandard"? (Edit: rereading this, it sounds like I'm accusing you or your dad of something, but I'm not! I'm just genuinely curious what this variety is!)

Because, you know, EVERY dialect of EVERY language has these features:

tons of slang terms, colloquialisms, and figurative language, along with several loan words [...]

and many dialects of German are nearly unintelligible to speakers of Standard German.

The whole Russian thing throws me for a loop, though. It's probably this variety then (seeing as how you said it was "Plaudietsch" originally), but then I have no idea where he gets this "Swiebisch" from...

[Jipí]

http://staff-www.uni-marburg.de/~naeser/varietaet.htm < Recordings of traditional regional varieties of German from the 1930s to 90s. Also use this as a reference for classification of High/East Middle/West Middle/Low.

I understand most of http://staff-www.uni-marburg.de/~naeser/25-Giflitz.mp3, since that's oldpeoplespeak from round where I grew up.

[Shrdlu]

Boo! I tried listen to Schwäbisch but none of the three existed.

[Jipí]

Boo! I tried listen to Schwäbisch but none of the three existed.

Yeah, I've just noticed some of the links there lead nowhere. But you know, he's an Academic, you can easily write him an email to notify him of that. Probably the email address is naeser at staff dot uni minus marburg dot de.

EDIT: Ah, yes, it is.

[Shrdlu]

It is funny but I can, as a Swede, pick out which ones that lies close to the border with the Netherlands.
^edit: Which one do you consider to be the most unique.?

[Sortsdam]

So this topic has moved past saying your native language?

Anyway, mine are Danish and English. I also spoke Russian since I was young.

[clawgrip]

My native language is English. The only person in my family who speaks any sort of heritage language would be my mother, who is conversational but highly out of practice in Finnish, which she learned from her mother, whose native language was Finnish.

[Zwap]

My L1 is Swedish, Stockholm variety.
Other ancestral languages would be Czech or Slovak although I'm not sure which as all I know is that my grandmother was from Czechoslovakia. There could also be be some Sami language back there. Possibly due to cultural taboos my late grandfather would never admit any relation to the Sami man living in his childhood home, but my grandmother and their children believe there was one. He definitively had a Sami look to his face, so it's not too unlikely.

[BloodMerchant]

Native Language: English
Mother Tongue, Native, yet almost not-quite Native: Wu Chinese (Shanghainese)
Heritage Auxilliary tongue: Mandarin Chinese, Classical Chinese

English is Northeastern American dialect/accent

Wu Chinese is Shanghainese with influences from Ningbo/Zhoushan dialect

Mandarin accent is Taiwanese with a strong Shanghainese/Wu emphasis

Classical is just written language.

[Haplogy]

My native language is Dutch, although I've spoken near-fluent English since I was eight.

[Wattmann]

My native language is Dutch, although I've spoken near-fluent English since I was eight.

Vreugde X)
Which Dutch do you speak? The Netherlandish dialects of German or the actual Nederlands?

[Lyra]

Native languages: English and Catalan, I think in both languages and it's annoying when I need a word in English that I know in Catalan or visa versa.

My English has an American accent with some weird bits thrown in...
And my Catalan accent is a mix between standard Eastern Catalan and the Ebro dialect.

~Lyra

[Haplogy]

Vreugde X)
Which Dutch do you speak? The Netherlandish dialects of German or the actual Nederlands?

Regular Dutch, of course. Even though I live in Noord-Brabant, I don't really have a very strong accent, and I don't speak any dialects.

I think in both languages and it's annoying when I need a word in English that I know in Catalan or vice versa.
~Lyra

I have that too, it happens fairly often that I speak Dutch, and I lapse into English because I don't know how to express a certain thing in Dutch. And even though I speak fluent English, I suck at translating because of things like that.

[Left]

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[Wattmann]

Woah I'm surprised my thread is still around! I wonder what else has happened since my departure from the ZBB.

We had Charlie, you see...

Go over to the thread in the Ephemera before it gets pruned as it's been locked quite recently.

[Left]

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[Miiil]

Woah I'm surprised my thread is still around! I wonder what else has happened since my departure from the ZBB.

We had Charlie, you see...

Go over to the thread in the Ephemera before it gets pruned as it's been locked quite recently.

Oh man, I could read this forever, I'm currently at page six. No spoilers please, this is gonna be a looong movie.

He dies in the end...

[Pinetree]

Personally, I was raised on English, but my ancestors all spoke a strange Low-German dialect, with elements of Russian thrown in.

an example of the Russian part would be the word for tomatoes: "Bockelzhonn", which shows up in this joke:

A Mennonite walks into a grocery store, and repeatedly asks the English-speaking owner for "Bockelzhonn." The owner has absolutely no clue what the man is talking about, until he says "Bockelzhonn, zum ete!*". The owner replies, "Oh, tomatoes! certainly, right away." The mennonite, now very annoyed, buys the tomatoes, and is told by the store-owner, "Looks like it will be cloudy today", and responds "Clau die selbst, dumme Englander!**"

*"Tomatoes, to eat"
*"Scratch yourself, stupid Englishman!"

[hwhatting]

an example of the Russian part would be the word for tomatoes: "Bockelzhonn"

Thanks for that - I didn't kow that баклажан could also mean "tomato", but I checked and it seems it does (or did in the 19th century) in several dialects.
From which part of Russia did your ancestors come?

[installer_swan]

Native languages: Tamil, English, Hindi
Ancestral Mother Tongue: Tamil (Telugu if you go a few centuries back) all perhaps mixed in with a lot of Sanskrit

This whole thread reminds me of a quote from a Palestinian refugee, who when asked about his mother tongue, said (paraphrasing) "My mother tongue is Arabic, but I don't know it". Unfortunately, my own situation is not much better because of the strong diglossia in Tamil which makes it very difficult for me to understand written or "formal" Tamil. Someday, I will get around to reading more and teaching myself better Tamil.

You seem like a pretty cool dude. Let's be friends.

Thank you. Though, through the years, I've found people like me more for my Dravidian languages than for my personality.

Another Indian, not to mention a Dravidian on ZBB, wow, I didn't think there were many.