A linguistic special

Last Saturday I had dinner with a Russian from Belgium, a French person from Switzerland, a Romanian from Germany and a couple of Germans. And to top it all off, we'd all met in America! But now I am back in my very german village, where even someone from Stuttgart is deemed foreign!

Here in South Germany life goes on. L is nearly better, so he's back at school, but is supposed to take things a little slowly (whatever!) The mum took a week off work last week to make plaetzchen (little biscuits) and other Christmasy related crafty things. That made my life easy, but now I'm back to looking after extremely hyper child. Luckily he's really into the rubiks cube (he can now do it auswendig!) which keeps him amused for ages. We're at the stage where me doing a 4x4 vs L doing the 3x3 is an evenly balanced race.

The world outside, which is currently out of bounds wegen L, is a winter wonderland. It has already snowed a fair bit (making walk to Kindergarten very tedious) and tomorrow it is supposed to snow alot! Amusingly, even here, a bit of snow messes up the train. I can hear the train announcements from my room (it is an unmanned station, so delays are broadcast over loudspeaker) and I've been woken up the last few days with an announcement regarding the next train's Verspaetung.

I've been here for long enough, that sometimes I have to think twice to remember certain english word (for example when singing a song in English at church, I noticed I was replacing alone with allein...) So in this blogpost I thought I'd share what I've picked up of the Allgau accent/dialect.

• The most obvious (to me) has been the numbers. I play in the local concert band where the conductor has a rather strong local accent. So when he says the number of the bar (takt) we're playing from, to begin with I could hardly understand it, but I'm getting better. For example 41 = ein-und-vierzig turns into uzaviersk.
• Secondly the ending -en, so prevalent in the german language is turned into '-a'. As all infinitives end with -en, this affects alot of phrases so now I've noticed it, I can understand alot more!
• Another common ending -chen is replaced with 'ele'. For example bisschen -> bissele. -chen denotes small (like -ette in English but more widely used) and I think 'ele' sounds far cuter.
• One of my favourite new words, which may or may not be regional, is Bock. It is used in the context 'Ich hab kein Bock mehr' i.e. 'I can't be bothered with this anymore'  As far as I can gather Lust and Bock can be used interchangeably, but the latter sounds a lot cooler.
• And finally, something that is definitely regional and would be met with blank looks if used elsewhere is the way of saying hello/goodbye. Hello is Griass di and goodbye is Pfiat di, I would be fascinated to hear the origins of these phrases if anyone knows. I've also heard Servus being used, but I think that is more universal, a bit like the german version of Salut.

And so ends my very random blog post, Pfiat di and good night!

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Bonus funny children moments for those looking for further procrastination material;

- M and L were playing energetically when M suddenly cried out in pain and started hopping around. L proceeded to get told off by mum and furiously protested his innocence. After a couple of minutes M admitted to standing on lego man.

- One morning I came out of my room, M was on the landing. He came to give me a hug then changed his mind, scowled and said 'Du bist die gemeinste Rebecca der Welt!' charming! (Translation: You're the meanest Rebecca in the world, a common insult)

- The same morning M was hiding in the corner, avoiding getting changed The dad was getting impatient so tried the counting down technique. '3...' then a small voice from the corner quickly followed '2 1'... That's not how it's supposed to work!

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And if you've got this far, here's your bonus song:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01m70dx

Enjoy!