This is an email I sent in, thought I'd share it here as well and get some thoughts first hand!
Hi Grant and Martha!
I'm an avid listener to your show (via podcast) and am an aspiring linguist. I moved up last Fall to Bellingham, WA to attend Western Washington University and join their wonderful Linguistics and French programs. This was my first summer in Bellingham and since moving here (from Bremerton, WA) I've noticed a LOT of little nuances different than my own speech from a mere 150 +/- miles south, however I can save those for a separate email or a conference!
This summer I worked at a day camp with kids ages 4-12. The last two weeks of camp, one camper adamantly kept saying "I'm gonna win you!" instead of "I'm going to beat you," or "I'm gonna win." We would be walking up to a building and if I were to say, "Hey, I'll race you to the door!" That would usher in the response "Nope, I'm gonna win you!" Again, this was said by him at least five times a day for two weeks (no joke). He is five years old and as far as I know has been raised in Bellingham.
While that was odd, I kept it in the corner of my mind and the last week of camp, I heard a different kid say it and just today (I work at the day care during the school year there) a random kid about 8 years old with no affiliation to the other camper said while playing Gaga ball "Oh no, he's winning you!"
This is a bizarre thing and, though it makes perfect sense, I've never heard "to win" used that way. Any thoughts or record of that being used elsewhere?
-Nathan
It makes me think of a phrase that is becoming more common, "I'm gonna own you" or "I own you." The term "own you", used in a competitive situation, is very recent in my experience but it makes sense. Maybe it is connected to "win you" which I have never heard.
Never heard it before either, in Arizona or Wisconsin, and I spent a lot of time in schools and working around kids.
I could excuse the 5-year-old as not yet having mastered the nuances of the language. But by 8, they should have picked up the difference in meaning. Given the competitive situation described, it's obvious what the kid meant, though still a strange use of "win."
I was thinking about suggesting the kids' age as the factor causing such speech productions when I read the rest of Heimhenge's response and realized that he'd already done that. :)ce
I guess parents' literacy level should be considered as well. I say this because here I notice adjectives or verb conjugations used interchangeably or alike, when it's not correct to do so, by children who have been raised in almost low-level-literacy communities and who may be weak at school themselves.
Were it an adult foreigner, it's simply wrong translation.
Adult American would make it extremely strange.
But here you have kids so young and it happening so consistently-- you are probably looking at something real here. Kids are good clues.