The joy of Spanglish
What language do you think in? What language do you dream in? What language do you feel most comfortable speaking?
As a dual-national and a person that speaks more than one language, I’ve been asked questions like these for as long as I can remember. My answer has varied over the years, but if you were to ask me for an answer today, I wouldn’t be able to give you one.
For a long time, I’ve found it hard to balance two nationalities, along with the languages and culture that comes with them, not even mentioning the regional tensions within Spanish identity. I’ve felt pressure to pick one over the other or to choose which I identify with most, when the majority of the time it feels like both, and sometimes, neither. Recently, however, I’ve been using the three languages I speak — English, Spanish, and Catalan — on a daily basis, both in my personal and professional life. I’ve never suffered from such an embarrassing and extreme jumble between languages; I’ve thought in one language, unintentionally spoken in another, and accidentally pronounced words with the wrong accent. Ironically, this switch up between languages and cultures has finally made me feel comfortable enough to accept the peculiarity and brilliance of not holding a single nationality. So much so, that I’ve seen some incredible benefits in my working life, which I think apply to most of us at Broadcaster.
- Due to the shift in speaking different languages, multilinguists are skilled multitaskers, processing information at a faster speed and with more ease.
- Switching languages and perspectives gives you more ability to thrive in fast-paced, rapid-growing environments.
- Multilinguism encourages confidence, which leads to higher morale and productivity.
- Learning how to communicate in a new language enables you to develop interpersonal skills such as problem-solving and listening.
- You become more objective. Speaking more than one language allows you to recognise how things are said, perceived, and explained from a very new point of view.
- Negotiating in a language that you don’t feel as confident in means you’re the ‘cool head’ in the room, by taking a second longer to reply you gain a cool, calm, and collected vibe.
- Performing tasks in more than one language requires more taxing thought processes, which leads to being more analytical.
- Lastly, and probably my favourite, you acquire vocabulary and phrases that don’t translate between languages, which makes for some very entertaining conversations, and occasional inspiration.
Oh! It actually turns out we don’t even think in any language — after a bit of digging, I found out that cognitive scientists have proposed that we think in “Mentalese”; the language of thought. Mentalese is a prelinguistic stage that occurs before the representations we are thinking about are turned into a specific language 🤯. So, our thoughts are actually independent of language, instead, they are visual-spacial, involving non-linguistic concepts.
Looks like I’ve now got another language to contend with 😉.
