I sat on a local bus this week (going into Wiesbaden), with my hearing aid on. Typically, I hate the hearing aid because it barely makes much difference with my tinnitus (the ringing in the ears situation). The thing is....you can start to hear conversations that typically would be beyond the normal range with the hearing aid on.
So I sat there and two older German women were in some moment of 'gossip'. One began whining episode about her granddaughter. One can assume from the chat that the kid must have been in the twelve to fifteen years old range.
The complaint was...the kid has developed this fake accent in the past six months. A Russian accent. Based on the conversation....one might assume that Grandma, her daughter and the husband....are all authentic 100-percent Germans. So Grandma can't understand the necessity of this kid to speak with the fake Russian accent. The word 'slang' got thrown into this, and the kid was even using Russian slang words on occasion.
All of this....had grandma peeved.
I sat and thought about this. Around thirty years ago in Wiesbaden, you basically had four groups of foreigners in the local community. You had Americans, Italians, Greeks, and Turks. That was it. You might have bumped into a handful of Brits on occasion, and a few scattered oddball groups.
Today? There's probably over 60,000 non-Germans in the city population of 285,000. You can pick up twenty-odd accents if you walked around the city today. Accents? They are forced upon the German society, and they can tell you in a heartbeat....what nationality the guy is from.
As for this fake accent 'gimmick' of the young girl? I would take a guess that she's got some new friend who is Russian and this is some 'fun-factor'. Who knows....maybe in twenty years....you've got forty-thousand Germans who are pure-German but they pretend to be Russian-Germans.....dressing Russian, acting Russian, and even throwing out slang as wannabe-Russians. It'll be like some new culture that appeared out of thin air.
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