This week I held the first week of work orientation and briefing for our new trainee who is originally from Wisconsin, US. Our spoken work language is Finnish and it seems she handles it brilliantly as she has been living in Finland for some time now. But I've noticed for me it's intriguing to have another spoken language in my world once again. All our docs and coding is naturally in English so it's not much of a stretch to actually speak English out loud, to me at least.
Despite this we have decided that it is good to use Finnish at work, because she wants to learn more and it's difficult otherwise, if we all keep speaking English. We Finnish people are funny that way, we don't really speak Finnish if the other person is not fluent with it, we switch to English too easily, because of our natural hospitability and because most of the Finns like to make the other person comfortable instead and we generally know English well.
I actually have some family from Australia from my mothers side, some of my cousins don't even know Finnish even though they have Finnish names, as they have lived most of their lives in Australia. I've never been there, but kinda through my special interest in languages I've learned to speak English pretty fluently and it comes naturally to me.
Anyway, solely the fact she is American living in Finland is kinda awesome in my world. After everyone has left the office we often get stuck in these long discussion about cultural differences, metal music and life in general. We have a lot in common and this week seems like a good start. I'm hopeful this will give birth to something great in our work community.
