What Language Do You Speak At Home?

[Wolf Frankula]

Watter taal praat jy by die huis?

Zein hizkuntzatan hitz egiten etxean?

Don't say English. Everybody speaks English, but what language do you speak at home?

Wolf

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

1. Cat.

Sometimes I speak Norwegian to the cats, but that's only because I'm trying to learn it.

[luvMIdog]

2. lol you beat me to it I was gonna say chihuahua

[TexasTowelie]

3. LOLCat and Urban Dictionary

always looks good on the job resumes.

[DFW]

15. I hope you have better luck than I did.

I have spoken Swedish to cats many times. They ignore me completely.

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

29. They ignore me in English, too.

[jpak]

42. Fluent Cat

[RandySF]

4. I speak English. The wife speaks Tagalog when she's on the phone.

[DFW]

16. Tagalog is a very useful language to know

Those people are in every hotel, every major restaurant and on every cruise ship in the world. They secretly run the place. If they wanted to take over he planet, they could probably do it with 24 hours, and no one would notice until it was a done deal. I was on a cruise ship exactly once in my life, and got preferential treatment from the crew for nothing more than saying "magandang omagá" in the morning and "magandang gabí" in the evening.

[Xipe Totec]

5. Castellano nt

[Lochloosa]

6. Southern. With a little drawl.

[Laffy Kat]

10. Ah, me too; see below.

IMO, a drawl is attractive on a man. As a woman, not so much, so I make a conscious effort to lose The South while working. I know I must be tired when patients at the clinic ask, "Where are you from?" It also shows up after a beer or two.

[DFW]

17. I never had much of one to begin with anyway

Although born and raised in the south, my parents were from New York. I went to school in Virginia, D.C., Spain, Massachusetts and finally Pennsylvania. My accent in English at this point is somewhere between neutral and boring.

[Laffy Kat]

20. You travel so much and that will dilute it a lot.

Even though I was raised in Memphis, both my parents were Arkansan. Hopefully, my accent sounds more Arkansan, softer than East Tennessean, which I think comes across as hard and twangy.

[DFW]

21. But I rarely speak English over here

So my English doesn't get bent out of shape as much as it would if I used it more. Most of my days are spent speaking German, Dutch, Spanish, Catalan and French, with occasional intrusion of others.

[lsewpershad]

7. Pigin

when with family and do not give an f if you do not understand... because I'm speaking to those who understand.... funny thing is, even though I speak better English than those who do not care to understand because of my color race or ethnicity..... will never understand no matter the language because of their sick prejudiced hearts.

[Laffy Kat]

8. Southern when I'm tired.

It's so much easier. You don't have to open your mouth as wide.

[Lunabell]

9. Dog

And cat.

[Doreen]

11. Cat, dog, and sometimes I mumble really bad

German sentences. When I say bad I do not mean bad words just bad German. I am in no way shape or form capable of having a conversation just bad sentences.

[htuttle]

12. US English with a smattering of Yiddish, Farsi, German, French and Italian

...Mostly the curse words. The rest is in English.

[TheDebbieDee]

13. Klingon...

[DFW]

14. German

Maar wij verstaan wel Afrikaans, and, of course, neuk piskat Euskera aitxutendot (I only know the Bilbao dialect).

Since my wife is German, and we have always spoken German together since we met (43 years ago), we're not about to change that, especially since we live in Germany full-time now. Our daughters are fully bilingual, since I always spoke to them in English and my wife always spoke to them in German. In a conversation with both of us, they will immediately switch in mid-sentence without a second's pause, depending on which one of us they are looking at. It's that automatic with them. When alone with each other, they will speak German, but have no problem using English if someone is present who knows no German.

I'm in the Netherlands once a week, and since Afrikaans is basically antiquated Dutch, I understand more than 90% of it. I haven't been to a Basque-speaking area since I was a teenager, so I never learned more than a smattering of it.

[RGinNJ]

18. Mostly stoned, chronic pain sucks.

[SwissTony]

19. English and Dutch and Frisian and Glaswegian.

My wife and I live in The Netherlands. She's Dutch, born in the Province of Friesland. She didn't start to learn Dutch until she went to school. She speaks Frisian to her family.

I'm Australian, born in Glasgow...and have two accents to prove it. My wife and I speak English to our kids, but they speak Dutch to each other. We speak Dutch to visitors. I speak Glaswegian to my family.

Our two younger daughters don't want us to speak English to their kids. Why? I have no idea. My oldest daughter speaks English to her daughter because she knows she will (and does) learn Dutch just by immersion. The kid's two years old and switches from English to Dutch if she's talking to anyone outside the family.

Frisian's an interesting language. The Dutch tend to portray it as a language somewhere between Dutch and English. Given that the vast majority of Dutchies speak English (and Dutch, of course), they should all be able to understand Frisian. Right? Nope. I don't know any non-Friesian who understands Frisian without having studied it. The kids and I understand it, but can't really speak it.

[Danmel]

22. As a child we spoke Yiddish at home

My father was a Holocaust survivor from Poland who also spoke fluent Polish and German. My mother was the daughter of immigrants from Belarus/Ukraine who fled pogroms in the 20s. They immigrated to Mexico because they couldn't get into the States because of immigration quotas. My mother was born there. They immigrated to the US through the Port of Laredo in 1927, just in time for the Great Depression.
In any event, many of their friends were also survivors from my dad's home town of Zawiercie, Poland. They all spoke Yiddish so we picked it up.

[Floyd R. Turbo]

23. Profanity!

[PennyK]

24. "New York Jewish"

I'm here in Florida now for about eight years, but my mode of talking hasn't altered -- except for the fact that I admit 'y'all' does serve a purpose. Otherwise, i still yell, curse, and throw in a bit of Yiddish whenever it seems appropriate (at least three times a day).

[femmocrat]

25. Fluent Pittsburghese. nt

[BarbaRosa]

26. mumble

[drray23]

27. english and french.

depending on the day or subject we switch from one to the other.

[Fla Dem]

28. Wicked Boston Accent English. Funny video.

[link:

|

[CanonRay]

30. I dunno, but it sounds a lot like John Belushi.

[neeksgeek]

31. Oh this is complicated.

First off, we all speak dog, even the cat.

Basically, my wife and I speak American English. That sounds easy but... it's remarkable how often we have to translate to each other, even after knowing each other for twelve years. See, her dialect is basically Californian, and my speech is an odd combination of Pittsburghese and raised in the South. So we often pronounce things or use words differently. We're still arguing about how exactly to pronounce "measure!"

Add in a small slice of Spanish (she's Mexican-American, but neither of us is fluent; we each know a few dozen words which pepper our conversations).

[missingthebigdog]

32. According to my husband, sailor.

Seems I can't formulate a sentence without the "f" word these days.

[Yonnie3]

33. I'm told I speak grunt and mumble,

followed by "are you having a stroke"

[JustABozoOnThisBus]

34. Grunts and farts

I can be very expressive.

[sakabatou]

35. Other than English, mostly Hebrew

As for me, I speak Japanese.

[yuiyoshida]

38. honto ni?

sugoii!

[sakabatou]

39. Honto desu

[Paula Sims]

36. Ukrainian, Russian, Polish, German, Serbian

Between my family members and friends and we do it to "keep in practice". We also subscribe (or read online) the papers so we can keep up with the language changes.

When my family (Mother, Father, Uncle, Maternal Grandparents) immigrated after WWII they spoke over 15 languages between them. I got the recessive gene. . .

[yuiyoshida]

37. 日本語 JAPANESE but...

my cat doesn't understand it!! XD 私の猫は日本語を理解できない

[EllieBC]

40. Yiddish and Hebrew mixed in with the regular US and Canadian English.

[MosheFeingold]

43. Similar

Some of my grandchildren and greatgrandchildren are visiting from Israel. I'm embarrassingly rusty on conversational Hebrew, but it's all coming back.

They flow back-and-forth from Hebrew to English like I used to be with German/Yiddish.

Alas, no one speaks any Yiddish but me. Save for borrowed words in English, it's pretty well dying out.

When the teenagers don't want the parents to understand, they speak Arabic, which is taught in school in Israel like Spanish is here.

[EllieBC]

44. Yiddish is still very common in a handful of communities.

Like Bnai Brak and Meah Shearim and whatnot and of course Williamsburg in NYC.

But the overall death of Yiddish and Ladino makes me so sad.

[Skittles]

41. Cat Command

GET OFF MY FUCKING ROUTER!!!

[Hassin Bin Sober]

45. Hovitos.

[retrowire]

46. Tsudish.

Tsudadadat baya deh we air!!!!

[Kaleva]

47. Fuckingese

Had a paragraph written here showing my fluency in Fuckingese but thought it may offend some folks so I deleted it and wrote this instead.