Would we be friends in my native language?
The cues you're not picking up on, for better or for worse...
Last year I published the visual story “I don’t like myself in French”. Surprisingly a lot of people online and real life reached out to me to say it resonated with them, either because they also experienced an identity crisis while speaking a foreign language, or because they liked this insight into a multilingual lifestyle. In this post, I tried to highlight the other side of language: perception, because I couldn’t find a lot written about it. It feels like a niche topic initially but it also touches upon a lot of universal feelings of judgement and belonging, so I’d love to hear if it resonated with you in one way or another. You can read my other post here if you’re a new subscriber:
Sources & Notes
The facts I mentioned about rationality are from the article mentioned below, which studies moral decisions specifically. The research shows that when it comes to making moral decisions, participants make different decisions in a foreign language than when facing the exact same dilemma in their mother tongue. The foreign language actually “promotes deliberative processes and reduce emotionally-driven responses.”1 It shows decisions about “good” and “bad” are maybe less innate intuitive processes than we think. In one of the experiments they had participants respond to the classic trolley dilemma in their native vs. foreign language and found that the rate of utilitarian decisions in a foreign language was was increased by more than half!
The article doesn’t specifically mention being less judgemental about social cues, that’s my own interpretation and experience. However, it does state that foreign language elicits less intense emotional reactions in many ways. That’s also why you swear so much in your second language — or at least that’s what I tell myself ;)
Costa A, Foucart A, Hayakawa S, Aparici M, Apesteguia J, Heafner J, et al. (2014) Your Morals Depend on Language. PLoS ONE 9(4): e94842. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0094842
As a Dutch speaker who grew up outside the Netherlands I am sure that I must miss so many hidden things and assumed social cues in the language just because I wasn’t able to be fully exposed to them growing up.
I wonder if that has ever baffled other people when I’m speaking with them? 🤔
The "rationality" concept is fascinating!! Loved this comic + the extra info at the end, and especially laughed at the "quatre-vingte-dix-sept" part. (Fun story, I finally got a French phone number this weekend and was all excited that it was easy to remember because it had a lot of nines until my wife told me that the numbers are grouped into double digits so now I have to say quatre-vignt-xxxx like 4 times when I share it with people 🥲 yay