I’ve got a step brother, born and raised here but to displaced persons from Eastern Europe that came over after the war. So he grew up speaking the language. Some years back while he was still young, he visited the old country. He could talk fine with other people his age there, but they told him “you speak like an old man.” He was speaking a “stuck in time” version of the language.
This is what happens to communities that have a wave of immigration, especially when it comes to refugee populations.
They are a snapshot of their culture in that period and it mostly stays stuck in time, especially with regards to language.
Meanwhile, a couple of decades on, the country’s language has continued to develop and change as all languages do but the migrant language remains basically as it was.
French Canadians are a good example of this, since the split was 300 years ago
Isn’t there a thing that Bostonians sound more like old English than the English?
No, they have simply developed in a different direction that is in some ways more conservative and in some ways more innovative. It’s not a really a good comparison to a single generation of an immigrant family.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
A Japanese teacher once told us how one of her friends married a Finnish man. His wife was basically the only Japanese person he could practice Japanese with so he ended up speaking Japanese like a polite, middle-aged woman, which her friends found incredibly funny coming from a burly Finnish dude
Japanese is a bit unusual to English speakers because there is a much more pronounced gender divide in word usage, and even to some extent how words are pronounced. The R-sound is probably the best example here where it spans the spectrum of a rolled-R, which sounds very masculine and aggressive, all the way to an R-sound that is just barely a tapped-R (to the point where you’d be excused if you thought it was an L) which sounds very delicate and feminine.
Of course choice of words skew to different genders across all languages but in Japanese, for example, there are multiple words for “I/Me” that vary in how masculine or feminine they are so the linguistic gender divide is really quite stark to a native English speaker.
In Japan women are also expected to speak with a higher pitch. Another teacher said she kinda forgets to do this living abroad and that she gets asked if she’s having a cold or if she’s angry by her friends and family when she visits home.
In one class a student told us how in Japan she was taken aside and advised to speak in a more feminine tone so people would find her less intimidating. She was a bit shocked because she just naturally had a louder, deeper voice
I can’t help it that the rolled R style Japanese sounds cooler
I once heard that Lenin spoke with an Irish accent. I know a few people from South America that also spoke with a US accent because that’s where their teachers are from.
I’ve known quite a few foreigners with distinctly American accents because they learnt it from Hollywood films.
