Language Roulette
Now that I can think in Dutch, I don’t rely on translating words and phrases from English to Dutch in my head before speaking; for the most part I can say what I need to say without conscious plug-and-play translation. As a result, sometimes my brain finds the Dutch way of saying something before it finds the English way. My English has, in these small ways, assimilated to Dutch. It’s these moments that give a glimpse into how the Dutch language is structured, and how insane it sounds when translated word for word to English. It’s fun (and funny) to take note of these innocuous missteps as I speak more and more Dutch in my daily life. Sometimes I don’t consciously choose a language before I’ve already spoken; it’s language roulette.
The other day I was on the phone with my mom, telling her my plans for the day. I was headed to a nearby lake for a swim, excited to read my book and get some sun.
“How are you getting there?” she asked.
“I go with the bike,” I told her.
“Do you mean you’re going by bike?” she inquired, giving me pause.
Yes, that is what I meant. In truth, I thought it’s what I had said. It turns out I had directly translated the Dutch way of saying this (‘ik ga met de fiets’) to this conversation in English. I’m so used to saying these things in Dutch that my brain skipped a step in translating. It seems a bit backwards that I would need to translate something back to my native tongue, but for me that’s the case, particularly when I’ve been speaking Dutch a lot and my brain is primed for it. Particularly with topics that are more prominent in my life in NL (such as cycling), the Dutch way of speaking jumps to mind more readily than the English way. I also hear Dutchies saying these kinds of things in English all the time, bringing these literal translations within closer reach of my daily speech.
These hiccups serve as testament to how much language input affects output. My day-to-day is filled with Dutch, which in turn leeches into my English—even when I’m talking to my mom, with whom I’ve only ever spoken English. It’s language roulette, remember?
Let’s not forget that black and red are not the only colors on the roulette table; those elusive green pockets play a role too. Similarly, there are times when there are more than two languages spring to mind. This particularly becomes a problem when cultural significance of certain concepts exist in one language but cannot be eloquently explained in another. I often get mentally stuck trying to articulate these ideas, wanting to say something in one language and having no eloquent way to do so in my target language. For example, sometimes Spanish provides a more acute way of getting my point across than Dutch or English ever could. The same could be said about any combination of tongues. These subtleties are what make language so beautiful, signifying the cultural ties and nuanced framing of the world that each and every language holds.
I recently had my first experience speaking three languages at once while attending a language exchange meetup in Amsterdam geared toward English, Dutch, and Spanish speakers. Throughout the evening, I found myself conversing in all three languages, irrespective of the language spoken to me. In this case, I was free to let language roulette take the wheel so to speak, trusting the odds to choose whichever language most easily and accurately got my point across.
From literal translation to abstract lexical gaps, these nuances to language acquisition highlight the numerous factors at play when speaking foreign languages. The gears are turning, and the table keeps on spinning. So place your bet; it’s language roulette.
Sending my best xx