#unless you count that Finnish translation of course... but even there they only had like one and a half swear words in total. so.

[starlene]

Jekyll & Hyde fans, here’s a question for the weekend: do you think Henry Jekyll swears?

I just recalled a time I had a slight disagreement with some friends about this (they thought it was a disgrace that one of the Finnish translations of the musical had put a swear word into one of his solo songs), and the memory made me chuckle... it’s such an extremely unimportant argument to have, and yet, no one was willing to back down.

For the record, I think that in his inner monologue or when he’s talking to himself, he swears like a sailor. When speaking to someone else, he tries to reign it in, but if you agitate him enough, he’s probably going to drop some f-bombs.

[gayahithwen]

Oh yeah, if we're going down the FULL list of languages I've studied to some degree, my list also gets long, because I'm also a conlanging linguist nerd (high five @guardevoir) (I got at least two conlangs to the point of translating the Tower of Babel into them, which is, as I'm sure you know, A Thing in conlanging circles).

Swedish (native language, acquired in childhood and studied through school as a primary language. And did creative writing courses in it, etc.)

English (technically my second language, but bordering on being a primary language because of how immersed I was from a young age. And, these days I live in the US and use it way more than Swedish, so...)

Spanish (only one offered at my school at the time, studied for four years, have tried to duolingo it a few times, still really really bad at it.)

French (studied for two years in high-school, have tried to duolingo it since, I'm NOT GOOD at it. But apparently my accent when I try to read it is "not the worst" some French speakers have heard, so... bam.)

German (studied for two years in high-school, even worse than my French.)

Latin (two years! in high school! I really wanted to be good at it, but the way it was taught did not work well with my ADHD)

Classical Greek (one year, in high school. I... remember the alphabet, mostly? and I know Caesar's last words were more likely "kai su, teknon" than "Et tu, Brute", soooo.... yeah, I'm not good.)

Danish, Norwegian (not really studied much, mostly just passively able to understand because they're closely related to Swedish. But we did have some instruction in Swedish class on how to read Danish and Norwegian, so I'm counting that as having had some formal instruction.)

Finnish (I begged my middle school Swedish teacher, who was from Finland, to teach me some Finnish. And she did! We had like ten, twelve private sessions, covering numbers and colors and a little grammar, but besides being fairly confident I can count to ten and say "hi" and "thanks", I really don't retain much of that at all.)

Japanese (two or three years of night courses, during my late teens/early 20s, right when that got popular enough to draw an audience in Sweden, so... once again, not much retained, though more than my Finnish or Classical Greek, for sure. The things I know how to say in Japanese are a random assortment of anime song lyrics, bad pickup lines (thanks, Miroku, I'll never forget "watashi no ko o unde kudasai"), and random politeness stuff.)

Russian (dropped out of that uni course after half a semester, so lol. nope.)

Also tried at various points to teach myself Icelandic, Dutch, Klingon, Quenya, and/or Sindarin. Sorted in rough order of how able I am to communicate with speakers of said languages (hæ, hoi, nuqneH, elen síla lúmenn omentielvo - the only phrase I actually know in Quenya. At least in Klingon, I can also say Qapla'! Though then again, with that level of fluency, we might as well also count Goa'uld, because I can also say "Jaffa, kree!"...)

Mostly, what I do retain from the languages I've studied is a) the ability to correctly identify the language, b) general understanding of the grammatical constructs, c) the ability to make an educated guess about what's being discussed, especially in text (unless it's Japanese, in which case I have higher listening fluency).

Entirely superfluous additional information on my language acquisition road:

English: So, for starters, only if the expected audience includes children who are too young to read subtitles do movies/shows get dubbed into Swedish. So from the moment you're old enough to read, you're hearing English and reading Swedish at the same time. And some movies I just watched in English way before that, usually with a parent by my side reading the subtitles for me. Hence how I was a huge fan of both Sound of Music and Mary Poppins before I was old enough to follow the dialogue (because I loved the music and the visuals, and knew the story well enough because my Mom had read me those same subtitles dozens of times).

We threw around a lot of English phrases, because it was cool. For example, we use the word "cool". Also "wow" and "okej", and more recently, "åsum" (awesome).

Whether the spelling gets Swedeified or not can be a bit of a crapshoot. This is the same language that spells the French "adieu" as "adjö" and "bureau" as "byrå", but also spells "boulevard" and "rouge" in French, so... Swedish is the loanword slut of the Nordic languages, though we still look like complete prudes when compared to how English gobbles down any tangentially useful word it comes across. (Which is not to slut-shame the English language. Imperialism-shaming, sure. But not the willingness to incorporate foreign words into the dictionary).

Anyway, I'm right on the cusp on whether I can be considered an Internet native or not, but whether or not you count someone who first visited the world wide web around age... 8? 9? as a native, by my teenage years, I fell deep into fandom. Which primarily happened in English, and was full of hyper-lexical language nerds. Aat least the LotR fandom and Star Trek fandoms were... Harry Potter a bit less so, that was more cross-discipline amalgamation nerdery (languages because everyone has a Signficant Name, and because of the Latinate bs, history because did you know Nicholas Flamel was a real dude? mythology because it's significant that Hagrid got Fluffy from (paraphrasing because I no longer give a shit about JKR) a "greek fellow down at the pub", etc etc).

Anyway, point being, I earned most of my English skills through direct acquisition, rather than through Swedish, so even though I did study it as a foreign language, it's basically my 1.5st language.

Spanish: My mom spoke fluent Spanish, because she spent time as a missionary in Peru (at least she also provided healthcare resources and helped a pregnant teenager escape the teacher who got her pregnant, so...) I have complex feelings about the religious colonialism my mother participated in. She was also the original Spanish teacher at my school, but the year I started learning Spanish was also the year my mom stopped teaching. And also the year she started trying to kill herself. So. Bit of a mental block on that one, for various reasons.

Danish and Norwegian: There was at least one Pan-Nordic (well, not including Iceland) edutainment show on TV when I was a kid. Very focused on people speaking slowly and encouraging kids to see the similarities. I was the kind of kid who ate that shit up. Here's a link to an episode where the narrator is Norwegian. And below, a brief clip from youtube showing part of an episode with a Swedish narrator;