4 ms·

An interesting thing I've noticed is that a lot of the younger generations in Estonia use English a lot when expressing themselves, especially when talking to t

An interesting thing I've noticed is that a lot of the younger generations in Estonia use English a lot when expressing themselves, especially when talking to their peers. I constantly hear everything from single English words in sentences, to fully English sentences used in-between Estonian ones. I'm sure this is something that's happening everywhere (because of things like Hollywood and most of the internet being in English), but with the population in Estonia decreasing anyway, I wonder if this is an indication that the Estonian language will be dying out relatively soon.

Nr7 7y ago
I've noticed the same in Finland
- stevekemp 7y ago
  Same for me. It can be fun sitting on a tram and hearing teens/youths speaking in Finnish with English interjected somewhat randomly: "blah blah blah and then I died blah blah blah good game!"
  - samsari 7y ago
    This essential phenomenon is nothing new, of course. In the UK, it's just as fashionable and pretty much always has been to borrow words and phrases from other more exotic languages. But I do agree that some languages are more inured to this than others, such as British English. Having enough native speakers generating new OC in the language also helps prevent a fashionable trickle of loanwords become a flood that threatens to sweep everything away. It's the same in Sweden, English has become so commonplace you see it everywhere. Probably half od all public adverts on bus shelters and the like are written in English for no apparent reason other than it's fashionable. "Yes" has become a fairly common alternative to "ja". But overall, I don't worry too much than Swedish is really under threat or that in a generation English will have taken any deeper root.
    - lawlorino 7y ago
      > In the UK, it's just as fashionable and pretty much always has been to borrow words and phrases from other more exotic languages. French is definitely the language of choice for pretentious twits who like to do this.
      - samsari 7y ago
        Quelle surprise! You read my mind.
      - Yetanfou 7y ago
        I say it is time for a Latin revival - quidquid Latine dictum sit, altum videtur.
      - johnzim 7y ago
        To be fair a huge percentage of the language is already French words. Brits just stubbornly refuse to pronounce them “correctly”.
        sneakernets 7y ago
        When English picked up all those Anglo-Norman words, they were indeed spoken as written. Middle English texts seem to confirm this.
      - pbhjpbhj 7y ago
        I like to drop a few loan words now and again, does that make me a pretentious twit? My wife popped in whilst I was writing that and said "guten nacht", incidentally. It's always been a thing in our family, in my childhood it was Kswahili and French, the former because of my parents history and the later because of family holidays en France. After German/Russian/Latvian exchange students stayed with us there would be other phrases. Nowadays I drop the odd "privyet" (RU), or "ca va?" (FR), or "<signing>" (BSL) but it's mostly domestically, sometimes that leaks in to the public arena ... does it offend? Perhaps people aren't showing off but just doing something they think is fun.
lawlorino 7y ago
I've noticed the same in the Netherlands
primroot 7y ago
At least in Panama, and certainly other Latin American countries mixing English and Spanish sounds like one is trying too hard at looking like one belongs to the upper class, or that one is uneducated enough not to know the right words to express an idea in one's own language.
soylentcola 7y ago
I hear this when my gf is speaking with her mom or friends back home in Hungary. I'd put Hungarian up there with Estonian in terms of "difficult for English speakers to learn" but I'll still pick up some bits of conversation thanks to the English loan words peppered throughout the Hungarian.
mb_72 7y ago
I'm half-Australian, half-Estonian, but don't really speak any Estonian yet still live here (sorry, nationalistic Estonians!). My wife is Estonian, and our nieces speak English to each other quite a bit when I'm around (and, I suspect, some significant part of the time besides that). People like me are definitely 'part of the problem' with the Estonian language being not as used as it should be, however outside of Estonia the language - as beautiful as it is and as significant a part of my heritage as it is - is almost useless. I've done some courses + read some books, and can understand the language a reasonable amount, but I cannot speak it. Time-wise, I find it hard to justify over learning more skills for my software development trade.
- distances 7y ago
  Which highlights that multicultural families should keep using their native languages when talking to their kids. It's a big asset later in life! My niece is currently adoption three languages (mom, dad, kindergarten) and I know another kid that is exposed to four. They seem to have no trouble whatsoever switching to the correct language when they've figured out which one each adult is speaking with them.
  - mb_72 7y ago
    I 100% agree, but my mother made the decision not to teach myself or my brother any Estonian when we were young as "there was no point as at that time it seemed Estonia would be part of the USSR forever and you'll never go there anyway". My Dad disagreed with this approach, but went along with it; it's one reason they're still married. :)
- juhanima 7y ago
  Thank you, sir, for your honesty. While mother tongue is surely a big part of a person's identity, any language is also just a means to an end. Some linguistics suggest that entire peoples have switched languages in the past in just a few generations for the utility and convenience. Kalevi Wiik for instance. Not being an avid learner of languages, I have personally always liked the idea of an universal language. English seems to be closest to the spot at the moment. It seems that Esperanto has its most avid supporters in China these days, because they would like the luxury of having to learn just one western language. Still, every language is also a cultural artifact the loss of which would be a bummer. Today we cannot read the writing of Rapa-Nui, the Easter Island, which is sad. The recently deceased Finnish writer Matti Mäkelä once talked about the idea of two languages: the language of the heart and the language of trade. The former you speak to express the deepest thoughts and the latter to make deals with all of the people in the world. Maybe sometimes in the far-away future we will all speak two languages, the heart-language and the trade-language. I don't care if the latter is English or Chinese or anything else as it's just about trade and utility. For poetry and confessing my love I have another language.
Mediterraneo10 7y ago
Young people across Europe use lots of English words or even whole sentences. It tends to be a fad though, a way for young people to show off how trendy they are. Once my own peer group in Romania all reached their thirties and were no longer so interested in showing off, everyone generally dropped the English admixture and went back to speaking fairly “pure” Romanian. Granted, Estonian may be in a different situation due to demographic factors.
- Mirioron 7y ago
  I don't know if it's really a fad. I use plenty of English words when speaking Estonian to somebody that also speaks English well. Sometimes the language switches every other sentence or even mid-sentence. Some concepts are just easier to put forth in English. I suppose part of this is that a lot of tech vocabulary in Estonian either doesn't exist or is quite awkward.
- dsego 7y ago
  I've noticed that younger people sometimes use english idioms when there is no equivalent substitute to convey the same expression in the native language.

Nr7 7y ago

I've noticed the same in Finland

stevekemp 7y ago
Same for me. It can be fun sitting on a tram and hearing teens/youths speaking in Finnish with English interjected somewhat randomly: "blah blah blah and then I died blah blah blah good game!"
- samsari 7y ago
  This essential phenomenon is nothing new, of course. In the UK, it's just as fashionable and pretty much always has been to borrow words and phrases from other more exotic languages. But I do agree that some languages are more inured to this than others, such as British English. Having enough native speakers generating new OC in the language also helps prevent a fashionable trickle of loanwords become a flood that threatens to sweep everything away. It's the same in Sweden, English has become so commonplace you see it everywhere. Probably half od all public adverts on bus shelters and the like are written in English for no apparent reason other than it's fashionable. "Yes" has become a fairly common alternative to "ja". But overall, I don't worry too much than Swedish is really under threat or that in a generation English will have taken any deeper root.
  - lawlorino 7y ago
    > In the UK, it's just as fashionable and pretty much always has been to borrow words and phrases from other more exotic languages. French is definitely the language of choice for pretentious twits who like to do this.
    - samsari 7y ago
      Quelle surprise! You read my mind.
    - Yetanfou 7y ago
      I say it is time for a Latin revival - quidquid Latine dictum sit, altum videtur.
    - johnzim 7y ago
      To be fair a huge percentage of the language is already French words. Brits just stubbornly refuse to pronounce them “correctly”.
      - sneakernets 7y ago
        When English picked up all those Anglo-Norman words, they were indeed spoken as written. Middle English texts seem to confirm this.
    - pbhjpbhj 7y ago
      I like to drop a few loan words now and again, does that make me a pretentious twit? My wife popped in whilst I was writing that and said "guten nacht", incidentally. It's always been a thing in our family, in my childhood it was Kswahili and French, the former because of my parents history and the later because of family holidays en France. After German/Russian/Latvian exchange students stayed with us there would be other phrases. Nowadays I drop the odd "privyet" (RU), or "ca va?" (FR), or "<signing>" (BSL) but it's mostly domestically, sometimes that leaks in to the public arena ... does it offend? Perhaps people aren't showing off but just doing something they think is fun.

lawlorino 7y ago

I've noticed the same in the Netherlands

primroot 7y ago

At least in Panama, and certainly other Latin American countries mixing English and Spanish sounds like one is trying too hard at looking like one belongs to the upper class, or that one is uneducated enough not to know the right words to express an idea in one's own language.

soylentcola 7y ago

I hear this when my gf is speaking with her mom or friends back home in Hungary. I'd put Hungarian up there with Estonian in terms of "difficult for English speakers to learn" but I'll still pick up some bits of conversation thanks to the English loan words peppered throughout the Hungarian.

mb_72 7y ago

I'm half-Australian, half-Estonian, but don't really speak any Estonian yet still live here (sorry, nationalistic Estonians!). My wife is Estonian, and our nieces speak English to each other quite a bit when I'm around (and, I suspect, some significant part of the time besides that). People like me are definitely 'part of the problem' with the Estonian language being not as used as it should be, however outside of Estonia the language - as beautiful as it is and as significant a part of my heritage as it is - is almost useless. I've done some courses + read some books, and can understand the language a reasonable amount, but I cannot speak it. Time-wise, I find it hard to justify over learning more skills for my software development trade.

distances 7y ago
Which highlights that multicultural families should keep using their native languages when talking to their kids. It's a big asset later in life! My niece is currently adoption three languages (mom, dad, kindergarten) and I know another kid that is exposed to four. They seem to have no trouble whatsoever switching to the correct language when they've figured out which one each adult is speaking with them.
- mb_72 7y ago
  I 100% agree, but my mother made the decision not to teach myself or my brother any Estonian when we were young as "there was no point as at that time it seemed Estonia would be part of the USSR forever and you'll never go there anyway". My Dad disagreed with this approach, but went along with it; it's one reason they're still married. :)
juhanima 7y ago
Thank you, sir, for your honesty. While mother tongue is surely a big part of a person's identity, any language is also just a means to an end. Some linguistics suggest that entire peoples have switched languages in the past in just a few generations for the utility and convenience. Kalevi Wiik for instance. Not being an avid learner of languages, I have personally always liked the idea of an universal language. English seems to be closest to the spot at the moment. It seems that Esperanto has its most avid supporters in China these days, because they would like the luxury of having to learn just one western language. Still, every language is also a cultural artifact the loss of which would be a bummer. Today we cannot read the writing of Rapa-Nui, the Easter Island, which is sad. The recently deceased Finnish writer Matti Mäkelä once talked about the idea of two languages: the language of the heart and the language of trade. The former you speak to express the deepest thoughts and the latter to make deals with all of the people in the world. Maybe sometimes in the far-away future we will all speak two languages, the heart-language and the trade-language. I don't care if the latter is English or Chinese or anything else as it's just about trade and utility. For poetry and confessing my love I have another language.

Mediterraneo10 7y ago

Young people across Europe use lots of English words or even whole sentences. It tends to be a fad though, a way for young people to show off how trendy they are. Once my own peer group in Romania all reached their thirties and were no longer so interested in showing off, everyone generally dropped the English admixture and went back to speaking fairly “pure” Romanian. Granted, Estonian may be in a different situation due to demographic factors.

Mirioron 7y ago
I don't know if it's really a fad. I use plenty of English words when speaking Estonian to somebody that also speaks English well. Sometimes the language switches every other sentence or even mid-sentence. Some concepts are just easier to put forth in English. I suppose part of this is that a lot of tech vocabulary in Estonian either doesn't exist or is quite awkward.
dsego 7y ago
I've noticed that younger people sometimes use english idioms when there is no equivalent substitute to convey the same expression in the native language.