Do you speak the language where you live very well, and if so, can I ask you something?

[Quintessing]

There seem to be MNetters living in many different locations, so I would love to pick your brains a little.

Could you please tell me where you live, and what language is spoken there?
Do the locals speak one language officially, such as administrative center/Council, Church, Uni/school, or the workplace, and a different in the local community, their home, with their families and social groups? Even dialects of the same? How many such languages are there?

For example, I am currently in Norway (where I grew up). Norway has bokmål and nynorsk as two norwegian standard languages, sami as a native language (which again has multiple variations), and I speak tromsøværing with my friends and family which is a lower form of the standard.

Whats it like where you are?

Some families have a strict "at home, mother tongue only" rule... It works.

DS speaks English in the house, Spanish or Catalan outside.

His schooling (he is 5yo) is entirely in Catalan, but all the kids when in the playground speak Spanish! And that happens in most schools - very bizarre.

He does remember which language to speak to which person, which is cute. He hates speaking English to his teacher (they are doing a book called Cheeky Monkey) and to his classmates. Thee teacher told us that when she asks him specific things about Cheeky Monkey, eg what colour are his trousers, how many bananas is he holding etc he almost can't be arsed to answer but when she asks off the cuff 'what are you doing?' he'll answer in English! Contrary little bugger

I can see Catalan will eventually become his strongest language, and that makes me rather sad for English, but hey ho, I'll get over it.

"I occasionally dream in sign language, less so now, it's strange because people who don't sign IRL do in dreams."

Yes, I've had dreams where non-Welsh speakers are talking to me in Welsh. My dream language (if there even is one, many dreams don't have much dialogue) depends on what language was in my head when I went to sleep, not the language of the character in the dream.

Siblings tend to adopt one language between them and that is often (though by no means always) the majority language.

Or the subject, if the siblings only know the words in one language. I once witnessed a father tell his daughters to speak English and they answered that they didn't know the words in English.

We have an interesting mix in our house. DP is Danish and I am English. We live in Switzerland. DSS has a Ukranian mother so his first language is Russian, our 'at home' language' is German, DSS learnt Swiss German at nursery but Hichdeutsch now he is at school.

I am pregnant and we will have the one parent one language policy at home and our child will also have Hichdeutsch at nursery so will be trilingual. I assume the two kids will speak German together but if DSS decided he wanted his language with his sibling to be Russian I would encourage it.

Interesting thread! My great uncle's first language was Plattdeutsch, but his children speak Hochdeutsch. He speaks to his son in Plattdeutsch, but his son answers him in Hochdeutsch - he wanted his kids to speak German, but saw no point in teaching them to speak what he saw as a dying/obsolete dialect. I speak Hochdeutsch (and understand Plattdeutsch and Yiddish) but spent two years in Vienna, so my German is now distinctly "Wienerisch"!

We lived in Paris for four years, and DD1 is completely bilingual, but DD2 is not - she couldn't be bothered with French. She understands, and can read, but is far from fluent when she speaks.

I live in Norway too. Living in Oslo, I only ever speak Bokmål as relatively few people speak Nynorsk.

FWIW we live in France and as far as local languages are concerned, kids in DS's school are bilingual French and English, Tamil, Portuguese, Arabic, Tamazight, Bambara, Turkish, Vietnamese, and Serbian...

I'm in Finland and speak Finnish fairly well, not fluently but enough to get by. I tend to speak with the Tampere area slang as that's where I spent the longest time but I still have parts of the Kemijärvi dialect in my speech as that's what my mum spoke to me when I was a child (I didn't learn Finnish much from my mum but it laid the foundations for learning when I moved here)

There is a written Finnish and a spoken Finnish so talking is different from what I learnt at language classes but I've mostly picked it up, but can be hard to understand sometimes.

This is a really interesting thread.

I am not an expat so can't contribute, however I was sitting next to a Muslim couple on the train the other day who were talking to each other in English and then slipping into another language (Urdu?) and then back to English.

I was very impressed. What a great skill.

'Little children can get quite angry if a parent speaks the 'wrong' language. So say mum speaks French to child and Dad speaks English. But hey live in England so when mum takes child to nursery she speaks English, but her child might have a tantrum because she is using 'Daddy's language'

I can definitely agree with this.

I speak English to DS, DH speaks French. If I sing in French to DS he says 'No! English! '. I speak 99% of the time in English to him but it's hard if we are completely surrounded by DH's French speaking 'famille' so I end up switching.

My French is far from perfect and DS (3) is already correcting me

Very interesting seeing his languages develop though, especially the different syntax.

I used to live in Moscow. I was fairly fluent in Russian if people spoke in the grammatically 'correct' way. As soon as people spoke as they would on the streets, I was doomed. My friends were busy trying to teach me the slang though.

Here in the UK children at the DC's school have 37 languages between them. (There are only 400 children.) DS turns up with new words which he just adds to English as if it is completely normal (which to him, it is ).

I lived in Italy and spoke pretty standard Italian, although I was informed I had a Milanese accent. There are other dialects, such as Venetian, which is incomprehensible to me.

Now I live in Canada where the English is incredibly standard for such a large country. Except for Newfoundland and the French speaking areas.

I speak decent French and cannot understand a single word that Francophone Canadians say. I once has a row with one bloke when I offered him, "chausettes" (homeless shelter) and he point blank refused to believe that this meant "socks". Goodness knows what socks are in French Canadian. I never found out.

In Quebec, bas (i.e. what the French call stockings) are socks and chaussettes (i.e. socks) are slippers. Clear as mud

That explains it. He was a right mardy bastard about it. Possibly he thought I was going to give him a nice pair of slippers