Quote Originally Posted by gRomoZeka View Post
But I had a friend at Uni, who spoke Russian (as everyone else), and only after her Dad visited, I realized that they spoke "surgik" only at home, because she switched between two seamlessly. It was cool (even if "surgik" is often considered a "hillbilly" dialect). In other words, most people adapt to general language setting, if they move somewhere with different language preferences, so there's no Babel confusion.
Interesting that she was able to switch between Surgik and Russian. If you take people in the UK who speak in an accent, they cannot just switch it off and speak Queen's English - only if they had training in speaking "accentless". I knew a few "posh" people from Southern Sweden who speak in the (terrible!!) accent from there with their local friends and standard Swedish with others. But normal local people there cannot do it, they are stuck with their accent.....

In Belarus, as I mentioned, I noticed that some people were speaking in accent. They pronounced the leter "г" as "h", for example. It's kind of funny that Belarus has never been a separate country before, yet it does not have the same problems with language that Ukraine has. Belarus instead, has lots of national campaigns going on, to make people feel "Belarussian" even if they originally are from somewhere else in the ex USSR or imperial Russia. They have some signs and official paperwork in Belarussian, but I did not hear ANYONE actually speak Belarussian, and I kept asking people about it. They all said "Oh, I wish I knew it, but I don't know it very well..." and things like that.

This is an example of from the Belarus pro-nationalism campaign: