Speaking in tongues

[sistermagpie]

Today was S's last day in my Saturday ballet class, because she's been transferred back to Germany, which is where she is from. She said she hoped one day to get transferred to India because she speaks Hindi, which I thought was really cool. She said Hindi sounded something like German and English because they're all Indo-Germanic languages.

C, who is also in this class, is from France. So we started talking about speaking different languages and C said that she was much more outgoing about her feelings in English, that she was very shy in French but now sometimes got frustrated speaking to her family or her best friend thinking, "This would be easier if you understood English." She felt she was sort of hiding behind the language but also letting her true self show more...which made sense to me, somehow. I'm sure if I ever finally mastered another language well enough to communicate in it I might feel that way. It also made me think of a discussion about TTT where somebody said it was fake the way Elrond and Arwen switched from English to Elvish in mid-conversation, only to have some multi-lingual people say no, that was very realistic, that they often switched languages depending on the subject. Some things are more easily spoken about in different languages.

So I thought I'd throw this out to the amazingly polyglot people on lj--I know some of you speak more than one language...do you find differences in yourself from one language to another? Do you all often speak English or just write in it? I used to have a bookmark I made that said, "To speak another language is to possess another soul" or something like that--does it seem like that? Does what C said make sense to you?

Comments

[sistermagpie.livejournal.com]

Ah, that seems to fit it with what a lot of people have been saying. If you grow up speaking both languages it's very different than if you learn one later-or perhaps it's more accurate to say if you start speaking one later. That is, you might learn a language from an early age in school, but only use it regularly when you move to a different country when you're older.

For example, I may speak English most of the time, but I find myself inserting Chinese, Malay, or dialects in instances where they will make my point (in the conversation) more succinct.

That does make sense--and also fits with the idea that growing up as bilingual is a different experience that learning one language and then another, or having the languages separated into what you speak in one place or another. I love the idea of creating a third language that mixes the two together. It's both more personal (since each individual might have a different preference for what expressions they like in each language) and a standard language (because I'm sure some expressions naturally get used by everyone).