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Comment by kuschku | Hacker News Reader

I'm bilingual in English and German, but when I use "Kindergarten" or "Uber" in an English sentence, that's still English, while when I use "Sorry" in a German sentence, that's still German.

It's really noticeable for me because when speaking English I've subconsciously adopted a British accent, but when using English loan words in German I'll automatically pronounce them in a very German way.

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I notice this as well working with my Dutch colleagues as an American. They’ll be discussing some bit of code and all of a sudden need to reference a programming concept or a class name that is English in origin and they will use their own accent. If I then come back to talk to them later about the same thing, it will have a different accent when we are speaking English together.

> or "Uber" in an English sentence, that's still English

That should be "Über", really, shouldn't it?

I don't know, I've never used the service, but the vowel-sound "Ü" doesn't occur in native English. I guess most people just say "Oober" and be done with it. To me, "Über" looks like a foreign word, not an import. In English, I think it's used only as a brand-name, and as part of the word "Übermensch", a term associated with a particular philosophy book.

So there's three pronunciations I'd use.

In German, the german word "über": [ˈyːbɐ]

In German, the company "Uber": ['uːbə]

In English, the company "Uber": [ˈjuːbə]

Words are assimilated to greater or lesser degrees. I'd say that au revoir is now English, as I'd expect any competent English speaker to understand it, but it's still commonly written in italics and pronounced in a noticeably French accent. Meanwhile, café is fully anglicised and not really registered as foreign at all, but that pesky accent remains in the written form, giving a clue to its soupçon of French (the truly English form of the word is probably caff).

> Meanwhile, café is fully anglicised

Oh, I'm not sure about that. I say "Kaffay", that is I anglicise the French pronunciation, even though I have a reasonable French accent. But many English people pronounce it as "Kaff".

But at one time Kindergarten was code switching and was still firmly German. It only became common English after first being used as a German word dropped into English sentences. It still remains a German word no matter how familiar that German word is to English speakers.

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