History of Your Native Language

[Humbleman]

I'm curious to know how the inhabitants/citizens of your country came to be speaking the language that they now speak.

Our Jamaican creole came about as a result of a mixture of native African languages of those who were taken as slaves here with the native British language of those who were our slave masters. The English language is easily spoken and understood by most Jamaica, and for more friendly conversations, we chat wi patois. A bet yuh nuh anda-stan?  :grin:

[Trellum]

Well, I guess spanish was brought to mexico by the spaniards when they decided to rule over the indigenous people of mexico.  They mixed with them, converted to catholicism and taught them spanish.  I think our accent is really nice   I don't say this only because I'm mexican, but also because our accent is one of the most neutral ones out there.  Plus is really pure, so pure it sounds nothing like the spanish spoken in spain! 

[BWL]

I speak a dialect of Chinese native to the Southeast coast of China and also spoken on neighboring Taiwan. It is not intelligible with either Mandarin or Cantonese. This dialect, called Min or Fujianese also preserves many words and expressions and even pronunciations from Ancient Chinese that have gone out of vogue in Mandarin (Cantonese still has many but not to the same extent as in my dialect).

[igorrsobral]

Well I'm Portuguese and the Portuguese language developed in the Western Iberian Peninsula from Latin brought there by Roman soldiers and colonists starting in the 3rd century BC. Old Portuguese, also known as Galician-Portuguese, began to diverge from other Romance languages after the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the barbarian invasions in the 5th century and started appearing in written documents around the 9th century. By the 13th century, Galician-Portuguese had become a mature language with its own literature and began to split into two languages. In all aspects—phonology, morphology, lexicon and syntax—Portuguese is essentially the result of an organic evolution of Vulgar Latin with some influences from other languages that I mentioned above. Portuguese was brought to Brazil when Pedro Álvares Cabral was intended to go to India but deviated from the route and ended up in South America.

[Rosa]

Well Humbleman, being Jamaican, mi andastand everting yu a try seh . Jamaican Creole is such a unique language and I love that. I should also add that although the two major languages that the jamaican Creole is derived from are African and English, others such as Spanish, French and Irish do make up the language too.

[mikka254]

My country was colonised by the British. Therefore, most curriculum and commerce is in the English language.

[Baburra]

My native language, Filipino, was derived from the Spanish language as we were colonized by Spain for a very long time. It's why we have a lot of words that are very similar to Spanish and it's still even common for people to know and use a lot of basic Spanish words like for when speaking of numbers and time, but I think it's seen more as an "old-time-y" way of speaking.

[sidney]

Our language is mixed, meaning we have Spanish and Tagalog language over here in the Philippines. Obviously the Spanish ones were introduced when the Spaniards colonized us, but the Tagalog language origin is unclear though, but it has always been with us and it probably originated with our native people.

[polaroidsredwine]

Everyone's languages have such a fun history.  Meanwhile with English, it's kind of boring.  Germanic in origin, take loan words from various other languages, evolve from Old-Middle English ... you know, the usual.

But we totally used to have some rad characters, okay?  Like þ (thorn, which I think is still used in another language) and ȝ (wynn), so there.