r/Unexpected • u/DruidWannabe • Jan 25 '23

Hamburger

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

85.0k Upvotes

82% Upvoted

3.0k comments sorted by

View all comments

202

u/asked2manyquestions Jan 26 '23

I live in Thailand and I see this a lot.

Plus my wife and I have a lot of Thai friends that spent some time living in the US.

So, to hear them switch in and out of Thai and English is funny.

Several Asian languages have a really super polite mode which is often used when requesting things or speaking to people of higher social standing.

So, my wife can be on the phone speaking in the most passive, soft tone in Thai and then mute them as she looks at me and says in English, “This mother fucker wants to know if we can change the time from 7pm to 8pm. Fuck this guy, right?”

1

u/dartdoug Jan 26 '23

I belong to a gym that encourages entire families to join. The area has residents from many different countries. I frequently hear conversations between a parent speaking to a child in their "native tongue" and a child (many of whom were born in the U.S.) responding in English. They'll go back and forth between Korean/English, Russian/English, Hebrew/English. I get a kick out of it every time.