If you lived on a border of a country that speaks different languages how is it chosen what language you speak? If you lived on the border do you just learn both languages?
Or is it more if you lived even like 500 meters of a border do you learn the language of the country your in? Do people choose it based on nearest popular city to where they’re at?
If you are Swiss, you just speak all the languages
Most people who live at the border tend to speak both, specially if people cross the border everyday to work
I live in Ottawa, ON, Canada which has Gatineau, Québec on the other side of the river. A lot of people here are bilingual and will just switch to whatever language works better for the person they’re talking to. The default language on the Québec side is French and the default on the Ontario side is English
Depends heavily on which border, I think. I live in eastern Austria and don’t know any Czech, Slovak or Hungarian despite those countries being within an hour’s drive of where I live. For the most part I expect people in Austria to speak German, I don’t expect people even in border villages of Czechia, Slovakia or Hungary to speak German; if they do, that is a nice surprise.
Some years ago, in a border village in one of these countries, a child spoke to me in the local language; I tried speaking in German and English, but the child didn’t understand either, I could barely say “I don’t speak (your language)” in that language. Eventually I figured out he was trying to ask me how old I was, and I could show that on my fingers…
I don’t expect people even in border villages of Czechia, Slovakia or Hungary to speak German
German is actually a fairly popular foreign language in countries east of Germany: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Foreign_language_learning_statistics#Upper_secondary_education
Though learning a second or third language in school is probably not quite what OP envisions here, and there’s a big difference between getting language lessons in school and actually being able to speak that language (shoutout to my Spanish lessons in school, I should probably have picked French instead).
On the colombian brazilian border they speak a mixture of portuguese and spanish called portuñol.