I am pretty sure everyone that speaks more than one language will relate (sarcasm and math counts). I mean, not that we want to show off or anything. OK maybe a little (or a lot) but sometimes we just start talking other languages. So, in this article I tried to list things that bilinguals and multilinguals do and the struggles that we go through.
1. We mix languages while talking and thinking
This is a classic. When our parents call us, we speak with them in our native language but seriously we have to include some words in English, French, Spanish, Portuguese or any other language we know, because why not. Honestly, when I speak with my parents there are times they don’t even understand me. There are times I don’t even understand myself. And I always have to write a note in the end of an exam explaining to my professor that I might have switched languages and I didn’t do it intentionally (and hope I didn’t write the note itself in Portuguese; Now that I am thinking, this happens more than I would like to admit).
1. People think we are angry when we speak our native language
My roommate sometimes would ask me if everything was okay after being on the phone with someone because she would think something might have happened, while in reality we were talking about things as silly as what my dad cooked for dinner. But truth be told, I do seem mad and talking fast when I am speaking Creole and other languages (poor roommate has to deal with my craziness a lot).
3. We include words of different languages while speaking.
Seriously, I don’t know how people understand me when I speak. One of my pet peeves is to say "Thank you" in every language I know how. And it is hilarious to see people’s faces when they go “Huh?” I remember back in college when I woke up one day and started speaking Spanish with my roommate as if it was the most normal thing in the world. She was looking at me like, “What in the world are you saying?” The problem is that I am Cape Verdean and my native language is Cape Verdean Creole and official language Portuguese and speak a bit of English, French and Spanish, so yes, I have one of those days.
4. You don’t want to see us mad.
Okay, this is the part where I warn you. You don’t want to mess with us, because if you do and if you piss us off you will be called of every name on the book and in every language the person speaks. I speak 5 and a half languages, so do the math. It will take a while.
5. We might be smarter in other languages than you think
You see, it is fun to learn new languages and it is fun to speak with different people but sometimes it is hard to translate everything that we know from one language to the other. But trust me, we know stuff.
At the end of the day, we would not want to change the way we perceive and understand the world. Our native language is what makes us who we are; it is what shapes us, while the other languages we learn are what help us to see the world and try to understand it (and we hope the rest of the world understands us too). So go out there and learn new languages. It will the fun and you will have a great deal of explaining and translating to do, you will complain about the subtitles of movies because they are not as accurate, and you will curse in other languages because it is harder to understand (but trust me, they will know you’re cursing) and you will have a great time making new friends and actually knowing new countries. It will pay off.
The Girl from the unknown paradise
