If you lived on a border of a country that speaks different languages how is it chosen what language you speak? If you lived on the border do you just learn both languages?

Or is it more if you lived even like 500 meters of a border do you learn the language of the country your in? Do people choose it based on nearest popular city to where they’re at?

  • solrize@lemmy.world
    291·
    1 month ago

    Such people are sometimes called Grenzemensch (border person). They grow up speaking multiple languages and don’t even realize til they’re older that the languages are different. They just think you have to talk to Uncle Fritz one way and Grandma Mireille a different way.

      • Skua@kbin.earth
        28·
        1 month ago

        The trick is that in German it’s fine to just take several words and delete the spaces between them if they’re expressing a single concept. Like if in English, we took the concept of Germans having a word for everything and just called it Germanvocabulary

        • yoevli@lemmy.worldEnglish
          4·
          1 month ago

          Another interesting aspect of this is that many of the German loanwords used in English rely on this fact without English speakers realizing it. For instance: Schadenfreude = “misfortune pleasure”, Zeitgeist = “time ghost”, and Doppelgänger = “double walker”.