Thursday, January 08, 2015
Javohl!
Sometimes instead of “yes,” I say “ya,” in a way that I picked up when I lived in Oshkosh, WI in the 1970s. It is one of just a few identifiable traces of that odd southeastern Wisconsin dialect that stayed with me as part of my somewhat eclectic dialectical palette after I left there at 13. The inhabitants of that town were of predominantly German descent, and although they were all native English speakers and very few actually spoke German, the dialect of English spoken there had a distinctly German accent to it. Later when I traveled in Germany in my 30s and 40s, my German friends would spontaneously laugh when, without thinking about it and when speaking with them in English, I said “ya” (ja) instead of "yes." It seemed to amuse them consistently. I got the impression it was partly just because I was throwing in a German word while we were speaking English, but it also had to do with the way that one word came out, sounding not only curiously and unexpectedly like a native German speaker to them, but perhaps also a little archaic, like from their grandparents or a very old film. While chuckling, they would sometimes respond with the longer (older/more formal?) "Javohl."
