Are you sentimentally bilingual?
These days, after completing more than two years that I’ve been living abroad, I started to understand the importance of being sentimentally bilingual.
Sentimentally bilingual people are those who are able to connect themselves emotionally to phrases or statements in a foreign language. It is common to believe in the idea that we tend to relate to phrases written in our mother tongue. It means that in general translations don’t reach us with the same intensity.
If you aren’t an English native speaker “I love you” won’t drive your emotions as much as the equivalent in your own language and vice-versa. Because being able to understand the phrase “I love you” isn’t enough if it sounds empty to you.
The same applies if your mother language is English and the same phrase is translated to another language. In general, words impacts more ourselves in the original language than a translation.
Speaking multiple languages is not the solution to become sentimentally bilingual though, but the familiarity of using a language to demonstrate affection in our day-to-day life.
If you speak two languages but use only one of them in your daily life to express: sadness, happiness, love… you will become conditioned to interact more with the language that is more familiar to you. Because although you speak two languages, you do not associate one of them with your emotions.
There are, however, ways to become sentimentally fluently in other languages. Actually the more you use your second/third/fourth language in your private life, more you are going to relate these foreign languages to your emotions. After spending some years immersed in another country, speaking a second and even a third language with international friends, my brain got deeply wired to the foreign language I use to communicate with them. Because now I have memories built also in foreign language.
Inspired or not, being this idea real or just a crazy illusion, I wanted to write this post only to spread this insight that I had these days. Unfortunately, I didn’t find any research in the field to reinforce it. However, after talking to some people around me, I could conclude that for some folks it really pays a difference.
Do you agree with this idea? Leave your comment below!
