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?

  • Skua@kbin.earth
    0·
    2 months 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
      0·
      2 months 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”.