'Shabba Upgegetten

I've always been interested in languages from the time I was a little kid. If I could do my education over again knowing what I know now, I probably would have studied linguistics instead of science.

English is really all I've got. I have some school French, but that's about it. I envy fluently bilingual people, no matter what the languages are. Where I went to university there was a course on Acadian dialects, and I kick myself for not having taken it (I took French up to second year). That would have been more interesting to me than all of my science courses combined.

Acadian French fascinates me. The fact that you can still hear French spoken at all in rural NS is remarkable to me, but any trip to an Acadian community will tell you that the culture (and by extension, language) is something people see as important to be maintained. Yet, everything is English everywhere around. The linguistic result...

I kind of wish I had my own version of this. The Von Foolishness family came to NS from Germany in the 1700s because the colonial government of the time wanted more Protestants here in case a war broke out with the Catholic Acadians and Mi'kmaq. Since no one was trying to exterminate the Germans or take their language and culture away, they likely didn't see the need to pass these things on to their kids (although my 91-year-old grandmother remembers her grandparents speaking it when she was like, 4 or 5). I think this is too bad, because I'd love to hear a mangled German dialect altered by hundreds of years of English influence, yet steadfastly existing anyhow, against all odds.