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>>How "Polish" is your Grandmother? I'm sure that you've heard of Danzig. It used to be full of "German" people.<<
Well, she was born to Polish parents (born in either present-day Poland or maybe Belarus) and her mother never learned to speak English despite living in the US for quite a while... (My mom remembers a time where her family here in the US was a mix of Polish-monolinguals, Polish and English-bilinguals, and English-monolinguals, and the bilinguals would have to translate for the others...) You could say that she is definitely more "Polish" than many ethnic Germans of her generation here were "German", since they were more often than not born to people born in the US (aside from a final group of German immigrants who came after WW2) rather than in German-speaking parts of Europe and were already significantly assimilated overall (whereas Poles here were a very distinct ethnic group from the majority culture at the time).
As for Danzig/Gdansk, the matter is that Prussia by the start of WW2 had had a very significant ethnic German population for centuries (even if many of such were descended from Germanized Balts or Slavs). The only reason why what was Prussia which is part of Poland today is really all that Polish at all is because it was ethnically cleansed at the end of WW2 and resettled with Poles who had been similarly expelled from the parts of Poland which were annexed by the Soviet Union.
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Interesting stuff, Travis. Yes, I knew that Danzig/Gdansk was ethnically cleansed, but I didn't know that many of the "Germans" were actually Slavs or Germanized Balts.
I think this situation of mixed monolingual/bilingual family members is common. I know of someone whose Polish family had the same situation. Grandma spoke only Polish. Dad spoke both, but never mastered the "th" sounds and grandson was monolingual and struggled with foreign languages.
It happens at my own family gatherings in another language.
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[quote]I guess she thought it sounded posh.[/quote]
Wonder how many know that "POSH" stands for "Port Out Starboard Home?" It's from the old British East India Company days. Port was the shady side of the ship outbound to Indian, and starboard was the shady side coming home. This whole discussion sounds like a "one size fits all" proposition. Some people have an accent which can't be changed at 12, and some don't. I learned to speak German in my early 30s without an American accent and I can move my English accent around at will. Age is important, but much more so for some than others. Other important factors are motivation, malleability of the particular brain, musical ability and others...
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i have noothing else too doo soo i will use my minesootan accent. i reeceently saw a baaag with some old goodies...blah. Okay so I wasn't born in minnesotan, neither was I born in the United States. Where I am from, there is a distinct accent to it. But I've been in Minnesota half of my life, so I say yeah and like a lot, so accents change. But I still retreat to my Nigerian accent for comedic purposes and nail it right on...yeah.
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