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Linguistics in Everyday Life

Linguistics is not a topic that most people consider to be a part of their life. It is strange to

think that someone can overlook something as fundamentally basic as the language that they

think and communicate with. An interesting question for bilinguals is, "What language do you

think in?". The line of languages inside one's own head is much more blurred than the average

monolingual. Someone who only knows one language will usually only think in that one

language. A bilingual; however, will think in one or the other language, or perhaps both together.

This also can be further investigated by means of when the learner learned said languages and

how similar the language is to their own native one. For example, a native English speaker learns

Korean at the age of twenty, it is unlikely that they think in Korean. But if that same speaker

learns German at the same age, it is more likely that they will think in some German because of

the similarity between the two languages. The most interesting is when a child is raised speaking

two languages. For example, a child is raised in a household that uses both English and German

regularly; that child will grow up to have bilingual thoughts.

This idea is a variation of code-switching that occurs when a person switches from

speaking one language to another (Poplack 1980). It is something that comes very natural to

someone bilingual, but it something that seems completely ludicrous to monolinguals

(Vorozhbitova 2010). The idea is the same when compared to weight lifting. If you go to the

gym and see someone lifting two hundred plus pounds, an average person would be amazed. But

anyone can lift two hundred pounds, or code-switch. It's all matter of practice and then it is just

muscle memory. What happens is that the brain completely switches from one language to

another in less than a second. Someone fluent in both languages is not translating from one

language to another, but actually speaking and thinking in two different language (Lim 2014). It
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is not something that any one is able to do. It takes years of learning and teaching your brain not

to translate. Even then, if a thirty year old decides to pick up a language, it is unlikely that they

will ever be able to speak and think without translating from their native language. This is

because the brain is already fully formed, the ideal time to learn languages is as young as

possible because the brain is still able to take in the information without an outside source (Evans

2006). Think about how you learn a language in today's world, "Mother = Mutter", you learn by

translating from your native language to the foreign language. Because you learn a second

language off of the base of a native language, your brain makes the connections from the native

language to the new language. That's not to say that it is a bad way to learn a language, it will

just make fluency more difficult because your brain is used to translating. Now think about how

a baby learns their first language, they see a chair and they hear someone call it a chair. And if

you introduce a second language to a still developing brain, it is absorbed in the same manner

instead of building off of another language (Jakobson 1960). This allows the brain to use both

languages in a cohesive manner, allowing someone to think in two or more languages at once.
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References

Evans, Vyvyan & Green, Melanie (2006), Cognitive linguistics: An introduction. PsycINFO,

830. <http://psycnet.apa.org/psycinfo/2006-03804-000> 19 June 2014.

Jakobson, Roman (1960), Closing statement: Linguistics and Poetics. Style in Language

<https://noppa.aalto.fi/noppa/kurssi/becs-e3060/luennot/BECS-

E3060_communication.pdf> 19 June 2014

Lim, J., Loi, C., & Hashim, A. (2014). Postulating hypotheses in experimental doctoral

dissertations on Applied Linguistics: A qualitative investigation into rhetorical shifts and

linguistic mechanisms. Iberica, 27, 121-142. <http://eds.b.ebscohost.com.ezproxy

.gsu.edu/eds/detail?vid=6&sid=3aa34f7b-748e-41a1-b553-9a060a5b8087@

sessionmgr115&hid=105&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWRzLWxpdmU=#db=ufh&AN=

95105364> 19 June 2014.

Poplack, Shana.(1980) Sometimes I’ll start a sentence in Spanish Y TERMINO EN ESPAÑOL:

toward a typology of code-switching. Linguistics, 18, 7-8.

<http://www.degruyter.com/dg/viewarticle/j$002fling.1980.18.issue-7-

8$002fling.1980.18.7-8.581$002fling.1980.18.7-8.581.xml> 19 June 2014

Vorozhbitova, Alexandra A & Issina, Gaukhar.(2010) Linguistic and Rhetorical Picture of the

World of Collective Linguistic Personality as the Basic Discourse-universe of

Ethnocultural and Educational Space. European Researcher, 67, 156-162.

<http://eds.b.ebscohost.com.ezproxy.gsu.edu/eds/detail?vid=8&sid=3aa34f7b-748e-

41a1-b553-9a060a5b8087%40sessionmgr115&hid=107&bdata=

JnNpdGU9ZWRzLWxpdmU%3d#db=a9h&AN=94332629> 19 June 2014.

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