![]() It was just impossible to keep up with it." "I always responded in the wrong language, somehow. So in that span of like three hours, every time the conductor came over, I had to switch languages. ![]() ![]() "And then when you pass Brussels, they change the language to Dutch, which is my native language. "The first part was in German and I'd step on a Belgian train where the second part was in French," he says. When he used to work in Germany, a regular train journey home to Belgium could encompass multiple different language zones – and a substantial workout for his language-switching skills. The Belgian native's impressive language repertoire includes Dutch, English, German and French. For example, insufficient inhibition of a language can cause it to "pop up" and intrude when you're meant to be speaking in a different one.ĭeclerck himself is no stranger to accidentally mixing up languages. When this control system fails, however, intrusions and lapses can occur. When a bilingual volunteer is asked to name a colour shown on a screen in one language and then the next colour in their other language, it is possible to measure spikes in electrical activity in parts of the brain that deal with language and attentional awareness. How they do this is commonly explained through the concept of inhibition – a suppression of the non-relevant languages. If you think about it, the ability of bilingual and multilingual speakers to separate the languages they have learned is remarkable. "For example, when you want to say 'dog' as a French-English bilingual, not just 'dog' is activated, but also its translation equivalent, so 'chien' is also activated."Īs such, the speaker needs to have some sort of language control process. "From research we know that as a bilingual or multilingual, whenever you're speaking, both languages or all the languages that you know are activated," says Mathieu Declerck, a senior research fellow at the Vrije Universiteit in Brussels. And interference can manifest itself not just in vocabulary slip-ups, but even on the level of grammar or accent. These languages can interfere with each other, for example intruding into speech just when you don't expect them. It turns out that when a multilingual person wants to speak, the languages they know can be active at the same time, even if only one gets used. Research into how multilingual people juggle more than one language in their minds is complex and sometimes counterintuitive. And the science behind why this happens is revealing surprising insights into how our brains work. But sometimes, accidental slip-ups can occur. Multilinguals commonly juggle the languages they know with ease. And yet, here in this most Parisian of settings, it somehow decided to reassert itself. I'm equally baffled: I'm a dominant English speaker, and haven't used Mandarin properly in years. He's just asked how many pastries I would like, and completely inadvertently, I responded in Mandarin instead of French. I'm standing in line at my local bakery in Paris, apologising to an incredibly confused shopkeeper.
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