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

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