I speak in a dialect when I use Finnish. People who are not from the place where I live have called my speech quaint and wonderful and praised me for being brave enough to speak in my dialect (insert patronising tone here). Those people were also using their dialect, but they didn't recognise it as such because they thought that was the "normal" way to speak. On the other hand, some older people here have told me the words I use are weird and that I don't speak like a local. My vocabulary and speech patterns are a mishmash. Which is probably quite normal since a society would have to be protected from all outside influences for a dialect to stay "pure".
I recently realised that parts of my vocabulary come down from my great-grandmother, who died before I was born. She was from another part of Finland and spoke a distinct dialect. These words are mainly the vocabulary of household items, baking and other things related to family and everyday life. I don't use them as much as my mother but still enough to mark my vocabulary as weird to some people.
English influences some of my sentence structures and the way I use some Finnish words. Words to describe abstract things probably come a lot from reading but I can't tell those words apart like I can the words of my great-grandmother. Personal pronouns and speech patterns on the other hand are local and thus different from the ones my parents use.
Can you separate parts of your everyday vocabulary by their origin and where you learnt them?
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