German or English

[Howard]

Hi Max. I’m sure one of the Wagners will respond to you when they get the time but my ‘educated’ guess is German. Where else in a place like Liverpool are they going to get the opportunity to stay in touch with their native tongue! Just like the twins chose to live in Adelaide in their last year of school, and with separate families, so they were forced to practice their English. How awesome is that!

I do imagine they might also practice some Liverpudlian while at home, but hope they don’t become completely infected and lose those really adorable German accents. I haven’t had the heart to tell them that Adelaide is the only capital city in Australia that didn’t begin as a penal settlement and that many of it’s first immigrants were Germans, some of whom were instrumental in starting Australia’s wine growing industry. The industry has  developed into a major world exporter, especially from the South Australian Barossa Valley with its world famous Penfolds ‘Grange’.

[Rudolf Wagner]

Hmmm. One might think that could be a simple one word answer, but we give you the long version: When it’s just the four of us we mainly talk German. It would feel a little strange “switching” languages within the family when this is how we’ve grown up and talked to each other all of our lives. But all of us are regularly incorporating English words and phrases in our sentences (adapted to German grammar :-)) as it is often so much shorter to express a thought in English. All in all we have got quite the mishmash going on, but as long as we get the message across (telepathy helps a lot) we don’t care much. Except when our grandparents visited, then we made sure to make ourselves understood 🙂

[Steve]

So then I guess you can call it Germlish or something like that?

[Jung Roe]

This was brought up on FB a while back but its quite intersting how when you sing, your accents are not noticeable hardly at all.  The Beatles too when they sing, you cant notice their British accents at all until they talk.

I like your German accents and hope you dont lose it.