Missing your mother tongue
A different person in English
‘Don’t lick before it drops!’ warns Elmeri. The research master student of spatial sciences is losing 9-1 in a table tennis game with his friend, who is looking far too confident. But his smugness now makes way for a look of complete confusion: ‘What did you just say?’
What Elmeri Niemi means to say is: be careful, be patient, because there’s a great chance of this going wrong. He knows that the Finnish expression doesn’t exist in English and that all that’s left in translation is a collection of meaningless words. But ‘hold your horses’ or any other English equivalent just doesn’t do the job. For Elmeri, sprinkling Finnish expressions into conversations is kind of a private joke, and also a way to stay in touch with his language. ‘I’m an advertisement agency for the Finnish language.’
Elmeri is not alone in his love for his mother tongue. Language is at the core of everything we do, think, communicate, and feel. It is an irreplaceable part of our lives. Yet most students at the UG have to navigate doing, thinking, communicating, and feeling in a language that is not their own on a daily basis.
‘When I speak Finnish, it’s like getting into a linguistic flow’, Elmeri says.
‘It feels like something gets unleashed when I speak Cypriot’, echoes psychology student Eleni Kouzi from Cyprus. ‘I’m much more informal, my guard is down. In Cypriot, I have more room to be silly, to be more creative in the way I speak.’
‘Slovenian has a different meaning to me now. There’s a sense of familiarity, it’s a way to connect to home’, says Tjaša Drobnič, another psychology student.
English
Yet all these students agree that studying and communicating in English, while in Groningen, feels seamless and natural: ‘It’s like my brain doesn’t notice the difference in languages; when you cross the threshold where a language sort of comes “alive” for you, there’s no need to translate’, Tjaša explains.
In Cypriot, there is more room to be silly in the way you speak
They all suspect this can be attributed to the many English-spoken movies, songs, and media they consume. ‘English is everywhere’, says Tjaša. And of course, Elmeri points out, ‘English is the academic language.’
However, their switch to English does have consequences. Aspects of your way of speaking and even parts of yourself can get lost in translation – even when you’re hardly aware of doing any ‘translating’ at all. ‘Different aspects of my personality come through depending on the language I’m using’, says Tjaša. She’s simply not the same person when she speaks English as compared to when she speaks Slovenian.
Sense of humour
Aruca Martín, a Spanish student of applied linguistics, discussed the phenomenon in her master class, but has also experienced it herself. ‘In Spanish, I think I have another sense of humour, a different kind of sarcasm, a more loving way of expressing myself’, she says.
Sometimes that humour and sarcasm gets lost in translation, she knows. ‘For example, when you say estar espeso, which means something along the lines of “you’re a bit thick”’, she says. ‘In Spain, this would be an acceptable thing to say to a friend who was having an off day, but I once said it to a non-Spanish friend and she got very upset until I explained.’
It learned her that not everything translates, and what is meant as a friendly comment might easily become an insult, even if the words remain unchanged.
Eleni feels similarly about her language. ‘In Cypriot, I have a degree of informality that I can’t reproduce in English; I can insult someone in the most affectionate way. It’s a very common thing to do where I’m from.’
Brain structures
This difference is not just perceived – it is real, confirms neurolinguistics researcher Seçkin Arslan. Slightly different but overlapping brain structures are activated while processing a first and second language. ‘How big the difference is depends on a wide variety of factors included in the language experience, such as proficiency in that language or frequency of input of that language. Language processing is a dynamic process that changes along with your experience with it.’
We always use English catchphrases and filler words, not Spanish ones
And it goes further than that. While students express themselves better in their native language, their mother tongue may seem unsuited to academic work. ‘I don’t even know if I could write an academic essay in Spanish’, says Aruca.
‘I’d be actually scared to give lectures in Turkish’, even Arslan says. ‘After twenty years of missing terminology in Turkish I’d have to search for words.’
At the same time, English is invading their native languages at a terrifying rate. ‘When I talk to my friends, we always use English catchphrases and filler words, not Spanish ones’, Aruca says. ‘For example, we never use the Spanish word for random – aleatorio – we just say it in English.’
Code switching
In addition to words travelling from one language to another, untranslated, they sometimes get some linguistic make-up in the process, as Eleni describes: ‘We take a lot of words from English and “cypriofy” them. Vibe, for example, becomes vibaro.’
The phenomenon is called ‘code switching’ in linguistics. ‘It happens all the time’, Arslan explains. Turkish heritage speakers growing up in the Netherlands have experienced it too. ‘In Turkish, there are two different grammatical markers for past tenses, one where you were a direct witness to an event, and another where you heard from someone else what happened. In Dutch this doesn’t exist.’
Coming here has made me value Spanish and Spain much more
Bilingual speakers of Turkish and Dutch are less sensitive to the differences of these two past tenses in Turkish. In a similar way, many of us are getting desensitised to subtle nuances in our native languages.
To Elmeri, this became downright uncomfortable. He now makes a very intentional choice to use his vibrant, nuanced Finnish language. ‘Me and my friends make a purposeful choice to avoid Finnglish.’
‘We are a bit lazy sometimes and speak a mix of Cypriot and English, but I would prefer to exercise my language so it doesn’t get corrupted’, Eleni agrees.
New appreciation
She values the sophistication of her native language more now that she has been deprived of opportunities to speak it. ‘Back in Cyprus, I got to a point where I didn’t like the language and I tried to avoid saying anything in Cypriot. But after coming here, I gained a new perspective and really started appreciating it.’
Likewise for Aruca, for whom her mother tongue has taken on a whole new importance now that she’s not surrounded by it. ‘Coming here, being in such an intercultural environment, has made me value Spanish and Spain much more.’
With opportunities to connect to their home by speaking their native language rare and hard to come by, the students resort to other means. Elmeri, for example, reads the main Finnish newspaper to keep up with the language as well as current events in his country.
And of course, there’s always music. Tjaša and Aruca remark that their fondness for music in their own language has significantly grown while abroad. ‘In Slovenia, I thought Slovenian music was bad, but now I feel a bigger need for it’, Tjaša notes.
Elmeri smiles. ‘Yes! I never listened to Finnish music in Finland, and now it feels like a great way to stay connected to my own language.’