I was at with my son at the playground over the weekend, and another dad and his boy showed up. The kid was speaking exclusively English, but the dad was switching back and forth between English and what sounded to my ear like Russian.
I think most people have heard someone speaking in a language other than English, and smattering in English words or phrases. I usually figure that there’s just not a convenient analogue in the other language. One example I have heard recently is ‘ATM’.
But the dad kept throwing ‘playground’ in while otherwise speaking Russian. Surely, there’s a complarable word in that vocabulary?
Why do that with what I would assume is such a common word?
Just realized I started with a GQ and ended with an IMHO. This’ll probably get moved…
I think the common term would be ploshchadka, or detskii ploshchad. Someone with better Russian will come along, but it is not uncommon to mix native language with words from newly aquired languages. Russian immigrants or second generation Russians seem to do this a lot.
In my family there are a lot of folks who are bilingual Greek and English, and they mix and match words from both languages. Sometimes they choose a particular word because one language or the other doesn’t have a good substitute, but a lot of times it’s just whatever word they seem to feel like using. They’ll often use a particular English word over and over even though there’s a perfectly good Greek word available for it.
I don’t think your Russian guy was all that unusual for doing the same sort of thing.
If it’s anything like my family, the Grandfather will be speaking his native language (Russian in the OP’s case, Greek in mine) while the father mixes the two together and the son speaks almost exclusively English, even while all talking to each other. It can make conversations a bit difficult to follow sometimes.
That doesn’t mean there’s no analogue, or even no convenient analogue. Spanish does have cajero (automático - which nobody ever says outside of bank documents/ads), it is as long as “éi tí ém”, yet people mixing both languages will use both.
Often it is a matter of considering both words synonimous - you simply use the synonim that comes to mind, so long as you have the expectation that the intended audience will understand it.
It’s probably not that there isn’t a Russian word, it’s more likely that the kid is more familiar with the English word and the father has gotten used to using it. Linguists call this “code switching” and it happens fairly often in bi- or multilingual families.
I try to avoid this and try to exclusively speak English to my kids, even though they answer back in Japanese. OTOH, my wife does this more often. She’s speak Mandarin to the kids, but uses Japanese words they are more familiar with for some things. She even uses English phrases which the kids are more comfortable with. A long string of Mandarin will suddenly be interrupted with and English word. It’s fun to hear.