I say this as a native English speaker… but I speak South African English (or something similar), and I’ve heard that this expression is due to Afrikaans influence!

That's probably because Afrikaans is Dutch, and Dutch is German.

Well, ‘is’ isn’t quite the right word… but they’re all closely related languages, yes, which is why I mentioned it.

Yep, I was being liberal with "is" there, but hopefully the point came across.

Dutch is German, and English is French.

English is French and German.

And therefore, Dutch is English :D

No, English and Dutch are distant cousins.

Haha ok- but then so is German. Dutch has Low Franconian origins, and the more you learn about it the weirder it gets. Also, it did not have the consonant shift- e.g. water (en) vs water (nl) vs wasser (de).

That said, after centuries of relative stability, modern Dutch is absorbing English words as fast as it can, who knows if it is still recognisable in 50 years.

I don't know, I think maybe Dutch and German are more estranged siblings. English is a weird case because the German part is very German, but then the non-German part is pretty big!

Afrikaans is Dutch yes, Dutch is not German.

Learn your languages before spreading unwise nonsense on the internet.

Not OP here. You're right, but you could be more charitable in your reading of the previous comment. While it's wrong at the micro level it's not even nonsense on the macro level. Dutch and German are at the very least very related. They share a lot of constructs and words.

There's no reason to be so disrespectful.

Similarly "I've been here since two days" is usually a giveaway that somebody's translating from French.

It’s actually also indicative of German! (and I would assume a few other languages?)

“Ich bin seit zwei Tagen hier.”

Hindi too, maiñ do din se yahāñ hūñ.

I wouldn't be surprised if it were most languages really, English 'for' seems the weirder construction.

You could use it in English too so long as you add 'ago' on the end. "Since two days" makes no sense in English because "since" refers to a point in time not a duration.

That still doesn't sound natural to me. You could answer 'since when' with 'two days ago', but declaring it as a statement I'd say 'for the last two days' or 'since the day before yesterday'.

You could get away with it in speech since it sounds like 'since.. [thinking] two days ago' and it's acceptable to change construction like that in casual speech, but written it doesn't seem right to me.

Could also be do din tak but that implies you’re about to take off

Do you notice an increase in this usage lately? I see it a lot on reddit and hn. All romance languages probably have it by the way. I know Italian does for sure.

Isn't German the same? "Ich bin schon seit zwei Tagen hier".

I said this long before I moved out of the US. I live in NL now. I wish I could tell you where it came from. Probably from my stepfather who was raised in a rural Texas area that probably had some old Germanic roots.

That sounds perfectly British English to me, to the extent that I thought your point was going to be it was something German had stamped out of you.

Interestingly, I'm not sure if it's nationwide, or a local dialect (Dorset/West country) thing - interesting because there's a lot of German/Saxonism retained in the dialect, usually about word choice or spelling though, not phrases. As far as I'm aware anyway, not an expert.

(For example we tend to prefer the -t ending of -ed verbs: 'burnt' not 'burned' etc. including in stronger cases words like 'turnt' ('turned' in any usage, not the modern slang for drunk) that Wiktionary etc. will tell you are obsolete.)

This example at least sounds perfectly natural to me, in California. I can remember my dad saying it, who was also a born and raised Californian. No German around whatsoever, shrug.