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Re: CHAT: Being taken for a furriner ...

From:J. 'Mach' Wust <j_mach_wust@...>
Date:Tuesday, August 31, 2004, 13:11
On Tue, 31 Aug 2004 14:15:25 +0200, Andreas Johansson <andjo@...> wrote:

>Had a strange experience on the train this morning; I went to the train >hostess to buy new tickets, and, of course, addressed her in Swedish. Yet, >she replied in English, and continued to use it for a few more turns >before switching over to Swedish in the face of me stubbornly sticking to >the same. She spoke English with a clear Swedish accent, so I can only >assume she thought I was a foreigner and tried to be helpful. > >I've been taken for a foreigner before, but that's always involved me >speaking in a foreign language. Possibly, my recent one-year stay in >Germany has left some mark on my Swedish, but the whole incident >nonetheless seems somewhat extraordinary to me. > >Anyone else here experienced something similar?
The Sunday before last Sunday I was cycling over a little pass (only about 1600m), and there was a place where local cheese was sold. I greeted the woman there, an elderly farmer wife from the region, I suppose, in (alemannic) dialect, and then looked over the different cheeses they had. Since I was hesitating and asking something she appearently didn't understand at once, she suddenly spoke to me in standard German, which is very unusual in Switzerland. She must have thought I was from Germany (alemannic dialects aren't understandable to non-alemannic Germans until they get used to them which might take almost a week). gry@s: j. 'mach' wust