Very interesting about Kashubians. I had never heard of them but might have some Kashubian ancestors! Northern Europe's history is a lot longer than the USA's, but it is still a mixture of peoples, as we tend to forget. I lived in Sindelfingen, Germany (near Stuttgart) for 2 years (1969-1971), and the common people there speak Schwabisch. Dialects in Germany (as probably in other European countries) contain some totally different vocabulary from one to another. In Bayern, the word "potatoes" on a menu was not "Kartoffeln" (perhaps "Erdapfel"?) and we did not recognize it. My kids went to German schools in Sindelfingen, and I helped them with their Hausaufgabe (homework). Consequently German overwrote Spanish (learned in high school and college) in my brain. But I never went behind the Iron Curtain in 1970, even to Berlin, though I wanted to. Germans that we met who had come from East Germany said they had learned Russian in school, not English. After finding data in Catholic Church records on LDS microfilms about 1997, I planned our 1999 trip to Berlin and Poland. In 1999 the Iron Curtain had been gone only 10 years. We stayed outside the former East Berlin & took the U into the city. Our hotel there was very nice and very inexpensive compared to further west in Germany. In Poland, we could drive hours without even seeing a hotel but, once we found one, it was very inexpensive to stay. In general, no one spoke English, and very few admitted to speaking German because they still hated the Germans. Our rental car had a German license plate, and in Bydgoszcz someone tried to tell the hotel clerk that we were Germans (so not to allow us to stay there). However, the clerk had our U.S. passports, so we stayed. I printed by hand items from a Polish phrase book to get accommodations at night. (My 25 year old son was with us, and I tried to obtain a separate room for him.) We had trouble reading some street signs and finding out where to park in cities, but we had a lot of interesting experiences. I would love to go back. In Torun (was Thorn) a retired teacher spoke German with me; he said he was of mixed ancestry, Polish and German, but had remained there during WW II. In Krakow, where there were tourists, some Poles spoke English. One very young woman approached us there and asked (in English) for a cigarette. We don't smoke, but many of them did. We thought she was just practicing English. I'm sure young people in Poland today can speak English. I listened to a tape in Polish before our trip but, although German and Spanish have some similarities with English, I couldn't find any similarities in Polish to anything I knew. We also spent a few days in the Czech Republic (because my great-grandfather was born in a German village in Bohemia), but words in Czech (as for "beer" my husband noted) are different there from the same words in Polish! Sally in Bettendorf, Iowa >My ancestors were all Germans who immigrated from Russia. Growing up, I remember my parents and grandparents referring to the Germans in North Dakota as belonging to three distinct groups: > Ein echter deutscher (a real German) > Swabians > Kachup > Do many of the people speak English? I can speak a little German (studied it looooong ago in school) but it has been overwritten in my head by French & Spanish. My husband speaks some Russian. Will we be able to get by with that?