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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 Ill start a sentence in Spanish Y TERMINO EN ESPAOL:
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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