n my family we spoke primarily Russian which is spoken in Ukraine. Our second home language was the language of our grandparents that is Ukrainian. I speak Russian and Ukrainian fluently. This is why these two languages I consider my native languages. I use both languages for all communication in Ukraine, Russia, Poland, Egypt, the US, Turkey, etc. However, I use Ukrainian as my native language in reading news from Ukraine and speaking with visiting Ukrainians and Americans of Ukrainian descent or talking with my friends in Ukraine.
My parents,brother and relatives speak Ukrainian and Russian languages on all occasions.
I started to learn a foreign language when I was in school. In my school it was English and I picked up some words from my father who took it in school and in college as well as from my parents' relative who was the English language schoolteacher. My uncle had a Russian-German book for military personnel so I learned a few words in German.
Because Ukraine historically has been crossroads, I think my ancestral languages definitely were non-Slavic languages like a Turkic language or even Hebrew. My great grandmother is said to have been speaking a foreign language because she went to a classical Russian lyceum in early 1900s.
I make attempts to speak “Standard American English” but my speech may include some Briticisms since that was a predominant dialect of instruction in my linguistic college.
During my college years I had exposure to Latin for 8 months and my second foreign language acquisition was the German language. I graduated with a translator's diploma for English and German as my target or source languages and Ukrainian and Russian as native languages. In addition I received licensure to teach English and German in Ukraine.
I come from the city of Kiev which is a melting pot of Ukraine and the international world. I speak literary Ukrainian as well as a Ukrainian dialect spoken in northern Ukraine where I visited for the past 3 years. My father's home language was Ukrainian and my mother's was Russian and/or a mixture of Ukrainian and Russian that is spoken in Eastern Ukraine. While in Ukraine I didn't use a lot of slang words, but I did use some argot at production facilities where I had worked as a technical translator or middle level manager.
I don't use slang unless I want to identify my solidarity or understanding with a person or a group of people of some familiar social network, for example, a new Ukrainian convert to Christianity participating in an evangelical church with an American pastor in a provincial Ukrainian town. The definition of slang is a vocabulary used by a subgroup of people who possess similar cultural, social, psychological and linguistic background or experiences.
When I was in primary school I first discovered how people judged my linguistic expression to be naughty. The basis for that judgment was the negative connotation of a word I used to call a girl and the teacher made sure I would apologize.
For the first time I became aware of grammatically incorrect linguistic expressions when my English teacher in middle school corrected my mistakes. Her judgment was based on the grammatical rules of English.
I had thought of speech as being more fundamental than writing until I started working for a German entrepreneur. Most of the jobs I performed were verbal interpretations, however the German businesses rely heavily on reporting in writing. Moreover, my linguistic college education involved verbal communication and verbal exams for the most part.
