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?
Speaking both seems like a great choice.
I mean… Babies and small children don’t “choose” what language to learn, they just pick up whatever’s spoken regularly around them. So whatever their families and community speak, same as everyone else?
Language isn’t defined by borders. What people speak in an area is what they grew up speaking and have learned to speak.
If you take the time to learn the languages spoken in your area, you multiply the opportunities that will come your way, socially, professionally, romantically, etc.
Such people are sometimes called Grenzemensch (border person). They grow up speaking multiple languages and don’t even realize til they’re older that the languages are different. They just think you have to talk to Uncle Fritz one way and Grandma Mireille a different way.
The trick is that in German it’s fine to just take several words and delete the spaces between them if they’re expressing a single concept. Like if in English, we took the concept of Germans having a word for everything and just called it Germanvocabulary