My response is:
Huh???!!!???
Shes commenting on foreign husband and equating length of time and location to language mastery measured by accent.
My family was here in America for well over 100 years, some closer to 200, yet we spoke German in the house and with people we knew until the 1970s. People one generation older spoke both, but without much accent. People two or older spoke German with a heavily accented English because it was only for use in public around those that you dont know as a courtesy to recognize the correct common language of the land.
The plattdeutsch we brought with us would have stayed relatively unchanging since there was no reason to speak with English as those in the area also spoke German. Since we kept moving ours didnt necessarily change to a local version that may have come about and seemed to stay older/unmixed and slowly becoming possibly our own.
I took that old and now wrong form with me when I moved back to Germany. I got along but sounded quite odd. Though I had only been there a short time I learned modern high German enough to communicate in a fashion that would make people think that I was a native of Kaiserslautern though I was only there for a few years. This isnt as simple as one might guess. Imagine someone moving from Brooklyn to West Texas or vice versa and the accent entirely disappearing. Now realize that I didnt just have to learn to pronounce things differently but there are grammatical changes also.
I have reason to believe we actually started more western in one of those dialects before moving to Alt Bork (and possibly changing our name) which was another dialect and then we migrated over toward Treptow an der Rega (where our name changed) which is another dialect before we came here.
I grew up in Wisconsin and am now back to the area my family helped pioneer in the 1800s. Despite that I often now have difficulty communicating in English. Strokes can be funny that way. When I woke up I couldnt speak at all. Over the last 7 months Ive come a long way. I cant speak more than a couple of sentences in German any more, Ive lost almost the entire vocabulary and cant assemble a novel sentence. I once was trained in classical latin, I know I took the courses. Life happened and I didnt get around to using it as intended. I read some books and things but mostly used it to occasionally read something like the inscription on a monument to try to impress someone. Dont remember really any of that. That is, unless I dont want to use German or Latin and then sometimes the words try to appear in English acting like caltrops to those parts of the brain involved in language. As far as "Greek", there are many variations on old jokes about people getting an injury and asking the physician if they will be ever be able to do something. When the doctor says they should be able to when it heals they say, "good because I could never do that before."
Anyway, length of time and geographic location dont mean much. We well could have been here longer than some of your branches but still possibly spoke less clearly.
I had written a much more involved initial post and much seems to have been lost in editing. My little ice pick in the eye and my youngest daughter came in and made a scene before I was actually done and effected the post and I was editing quite a bit as I was trying to finish before it was abandoned. More than one thing happening, more than one stimulus, its still very difficult to find my way through in those situations without everything blowing up.
They are back home and at it again now. You likely have no idea how much effort this has taken this time and Im still angry about how much effort was lost earlier. Im sure there is something else I should have cleared but its mentally very exhausting when the different control centers in your brain are fighting with one another and much like these threads, since all of them have to be correct they cant check with the next one over for verification. I didnt really want to go into all of this here, I thought I may have mentioned it to LJ on another occasion.
...Oh crap. I just lost a bunch more....
I cant even get the train of thought back.
Despite potentially having been here longer than some branches of your family, mine still quite possibly communicated poorly by comparison.
I cant recreate what Ive lost and I still have editing to do but with all of this now Im quite irritated and and a bit confused so Im just going to end it here without further comments for now as I dont wish to misfire.
Im probably just going tolog off for tonight.