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Yes. My native tongue is Bengali—the 7th most spoken language in the world. I learned English at school and later started working remotely in places where Engl
by rednafi 2y ago
Yes. My native tongue is Bengali—the 7th most spoken language in the world.
I learned English at school and later started working remotely in places where English was obviously the primary language. Then I moved to the US and spoke Bengali only at home.
The final nail in the coffin was when I moved again to Berlin, Germany, and started picking up a little German just to get by. Now I speak English at work, Bengali at home, and a tiny bit of German. These days, my Bengali is a horrible hodgepodge of English and Bengali words strung together by alien conjunctions and interjections.
- FlyingSnake 2y agoPeople from the subcontinent have this weird habit of adding English words randomly in their conversations. Sentences in Hindi/Bangla/Tamil etc and then straight up English words, and then switch back. Haven’t seen anyone else do that.
- _1tem 2y agoGermans do that all the time. See Berlinglish. So do Ukrainians, although less often.
- StrauXX 2y agoDo you mean Anglicisms? Those are very common in many languages nowadays. Especially those in the west. Youth language in the German speaking areas of Europe is around one fourth English words.
- FlyingSnake 2y agoYes, I’ve seen kids in Berlin do that as well, but this is not a recent phenomenon for Indians. I’ve observed it for more than 15 years now
- inkyoto 2y agoIt is called «code switching», and it is also very common amongst Hongkongers and Singaporeans.
- rednafi 2y agoGen Z Spanish speakers do this all the time.
- somenameforme 2y agoThere was an interview with Gukesh Dommaraju after he won the chess world championship, and the interviewer from India asked him to respond in his native tongue which, so far as I understand it is Tamil. It was very odd listening to it when I could understand about 30% of the words!