It was a fun encounter. My dad sent me to Vons for salad ingredients around Christmas. As I approached the lettuce, a couple ladies switched from speaking English to German. I selected my lettuce, then offered a seasonally apropos, "Froliche Weinachten". I had recently passed my oral and written proficiency exams in German at UCSD. Welcome to America. We speak lots of languages here :-)
I studied German for four years in high skrool and became almost fluent in hoechedeutsche - able to carry on conversations about writers like Mann, et al completely in German.
Funny (and true) story: Bought a couple of pivots from a dealer in Utah. He was too busy to erect & install them himself, so he sub’ed out the job to a family-owned company from West Texas. They were a Mennonite clan.
Anyway, so the pivots arrive by two 18-wheelers, we scatter the parts out on the ground and the fellas get to erecting them. They were GOOD. Knew this business like the backs of their hands. The first day, they’re talking in west Texas English. The second day, tho, they were getting tired and they started talking to each other (there were five of them) in what “sounded” like German. So I up and asked one of the senior guys “Hey, what’s that you’re speaking?”
And he says “Oh, sorry, we speak German in our congregation and in our town most of the time...” and so I reply in hoechdeutsche “nichts passiert, I can auch Deutsche...” and the expression on his face was one of complete surprise - and he hollers down the field “Hey! Guys! This guy can speak German!”
And so they all drop their tools and come running over - when I’d been working next to them for a day and a half. It was as tho I was suddenly a discovery and them some — a guy in the middle of Nevada who could speak German.
Long story short — their families came into Texas in the mid-1800’s from Germany with a wave of Mennonite immigration, ended up in Texas shortly after that Alamo thing, and when they came over, it was most all of the community/congregation. Their German was a dialect I’d never heard, and it was as tho it were frozen in amber - it was old-sounding German, with old idioms, the works. It sounded nothing at all like modern German, and they thought my modern “high German” was completely alien to their ears. They never listened to shortwave radio or German language TV, so they had no idea how German had changed. They just knew from the time they were young ‘un’s that “this is what we speak in church and at home, and we speak this other language out in public...” and that was that.
Yep, we speak a lot of languages here....