Fiona’s Reviews > Four Words for Friend: Why Using More than One Language Matters Now More than Ever > Status Update

Living in Paris, and wrestling with the question of whether to write in Greek or French, the novelist Vassilis Alexakis observed how his Vietnamese neighbours drew the line. They spoke to each other in Vietnamese, but they spoke French to the stray cat they had adopted. It was, after all, a native.

The ability to toggle between two languages is about as near as one can get to being in two places at once. And above all, a knowledge of more than one language – even a highly unbalanced knowledge – creates an awareness that in different languages, a myriad details of the world are different. Sometimes conscious, sometimes tacit, sometimes hovering discreetly in the background, this sense of alternatives

Using a foreign language seems to disconnect people from their emotions, and hence their susceptibility to superstitions. A broken mirror made a less vivid image when evoked by a foreign language than by a native tongue. Imagination may be dimmed by foreign languages, which do not connect to the memories people use to create new mental images; feelings and choices may be less coloured by emotion in consequence.

People who live in more than one language often struggle to describe and explain the sensations that arise from moving between them. They welcome being asked if they feel different in different languages, though, because they have asked themselves the same question. In this sense its undoubtedly a real phenomenon. But is it a subjective one? Can observers detect any signs that languages activate changes in behaviour

The English aristocracy copied the French polite plural in the Middle Ages, casting ‘you’ as the distanced form and ‘thou’ as the familiar one. By the middle of the seventeenth century, ‘you’ had driven ‘thou’ out of standard English altogether—possibly because middle-class people now comprised an increasingly influential section of society, but were unsure where they stood in relation to each other

Noah Chomsky transformed linguistics from scholars who had dominated the discipline. Their modus operandi was the collection of data about individual languages. Chomsky dismissed the detail as trivial. "A Martian scientist he observed, might reasonably conclude that there is a single human language with differences only at the margins. Terrestrial scientists' task is to elucidate the universal grammer of the language

If language had a term for one other colour besides black and white that colour invariably was RED..
being able to see a colour may be a vital ability, but being able to name it may be an irrelevance..
The assessment of potential food for example. If fruits look green when unripe and red when ripe or leaves look green when fresh and yellow when dying, it is a lot easier to identify food that is good to eat.

In the area of motion, the difference investigators have found most compelling is between languages whose verbs express the manner of movement and those whose verbs carry information about its path. An English speaker might say ‘the ball rolled out of the box’, for example, a Spanish speaker would say ‘la pelota salió de la caja rodando’, which is roughly equivalent to ‘the ball exited the box rolling’.

One day in a carpentry class he struck his bodged woodwork construction with his hammer once too often, and it broke. That’s what he told the teacher with a shrug: ‘Se rompió.’
This incensed the teacher—not the breakage, but the usage. ‘Se, se, se,’ he hissed. ‘Everything in this country is se, it broke, it just happened, why the hell don’t you say I broke it, I screwed up. Say it, say, Yo lo rompí

Bak notes that research tends to be positive about bilingualism in countries that are positive about it, such as Canada, and negative in countries that have an ambivalent attitude towards it, the United States in particular. The prevailing climate of opinion might influence the attitudes researchers bring to their studies, the answers they expect to find, they way they interpret their data,