WEBVTT 00:01.000 --> 00:11.000 So my mother tongue is Greek in any case, although the Greek I was taught as a small child, what I learned, was not really Greek in that sense. 00:12.000 --> 00:23.000 This has to do with the fact that my parents are Pontians, i.e. Greek Pontians, and therefore spoke a dialect with each other and logically with me as a small child, which is not quite Greek. 00:24.000 --> 00:32.000 It's similar to Greek, and it's close, but it's originally from the Black Sea region. And it was spoken in my parents' village, before they came to Germany. 00:33.000 --> 00:44.000 They grew up speaking Pontic and then tried to speak Greek with me and with my brother, but of course Pontic kept creeping in, 00:45.000 --> 00:58.000 because I don't think my parents could really speak good, proper Greek either. Because I also went to a Greek school in Germany, that led to me, 00:59.000 --> 01:06.000 learning "better2 Greek. But thank God I had aunts and uncles around me who spoke Greek. 01:07.000 --> 01:16.000 I then spoke a strange mixture, Greek, mixed with some Pontic words now and then. 01:17.000 --> 01:28.000 There are actually words that I only realised were Pontic a few years ago. Some friends pointed that out to me. 01:29.000 --> 01:41.000 That was how we spoke at home, Greek-Pontic. And since I was born and raised in Germany, German influences came very quickly. 01:42.000 --> 01:53.000 I didn't go to kindergarten, both my parents were working, so I was "passed around" in our neighbourhood. And there were all kinds of people from different nationalities. 01:54.000 --> 01:59.000 There was a Greek woman, one from Czechoslovakia, one from Hamburg, who had moved here and was originally from the Ruhr area. 02:00.000 --> 02:08.000 That meant that I would wake up in the morning in one place and have breakfast at another. And that's where the German language influences came in, of course. 02:09.000 --> 02:25.000 So Greek is my mother tongue. I'm still learning in my mother tongue today actually because the vocabulary used in my family is just not sufficient. 02:26.000 --> 02:33.000 I know that I can express myself much better in German, which is certainly due to the fact that everything I have learned in the course of time, 02:34.000 --> 02:40.000 at school, in my private and social life, has been in German. 02:41.000 --> 02:50.000 That is, all the vocabulary in the political and philosophical sphere is German. So all the vocabulary I use in discussions is German. 02:51.000 --> 02:59.000 And in Greek, it was always limited to: "How was school?", "Did you eat something?", "Do you want something to eat?", "everyday Greek" so to speak. 03:00.000 --> 03:11.000 Combined with Pontic, we also call it village Greek. The Greek spoken in Greece is something else entirely. 03:12.000 --> 03:11.000 I understand that now and can speak it quite well. But the mother tongue I grew up with was this kind of village Greek.