How Do You Feel In, and About Your Language(s)?
On emotional resonance of a language and when kid talks get more complex (in multiple vernaculars)
I have been in full-on academic mode the past two weeks, attending end-of-the -year lectures, seminars and presenting some of my own research. It has been an anxiety-inducing blur: mothering, working, shuttling my children around and high-fiving my partner as we pass the children off, most often at a train station, him coming from work, me coming from something child-related, heading to work-related stuff, our children, invaluable little cargo, shuttled between us. I message him to say which carriage we will be in; he heads to the corresponding point on the tube platform and I make the carefully-orchestrated drop – is that what it is called in crime/cop shows? Or is it called a switch? During the madness week last week, London was also having a heatwave, so the tube was extra fun (note: delayed, sweaty and smelly). I feel like I lived 25 lives and aged 25 years in seven days. BTW, my children are living their best, two-popsicle (ice lolly)-per-day lives, so they are great, it’s just us adults who are exhausted!
One of the lectures I attended last week was called, “Psychological Therapies in a Multilingual World”. The talk was about multilingualism and psychotherapy and why it is vital patients are able to use their full linguistic repertoire in counselling sessions. There is a lot of research on why a first language (L1) is felt to be more emotional, while a language learnt later in life, has a weaker emotional resonance. However, a later language can still have a strong emotional resonance, or sometimes, can even become emotionally stronger over a first language1.
In therapy, patients might prefer to use a language that has a weaker emotional resonance to discuss painful and traumatic events. Sometimes, code-switching from one language to another (using the language that has less emotional resonance to name something during a conversation in the language with more emotional resonance) might also occur.
Research shows there are many different reasons why someone would choose one language over another to express feelings (in therapy or in general life). It may depend on the age of acquisition (when the language was acquired, either in childhood or later in life), on how each language is used (linguist François Grosjean’s Complementarity Principle on how multilinguals use their languages differently depending on domain and fluency) and how the language was learnt (school versus at home, for example). Proficiency and fluency are interesting because for those people who are more or less “balanced bilinguals”, the choice of language in an emotional situation very much depends on the emotional resonance of each language and context.
There are also studies about how multilinguals feel differently in each language depending on whether they are showing affection (saying: “I love you”, for example), praying, lying or swearing.
In our family, we say, “I love you” and “Kocham cie” (the Polish version) interchangeably although, I tend to use the latter more now. It wasn’t always the case and for me, it is not about emotional resonance so much as it is about frequency. I simply say “I love you” in Polish to my children more than in English because I try to speak as much Polish with them as possible and the sentiment is equally strong in both languages.
Going back to Grosjean’s Complementarity Principle, as my children get older, the topics of our discussions become more complex and I do find myself struggling to explain certain things in Polish, a language I have high proficiency in but that is still my non-dominant language. A while back, at 10 p.m. (it is always at 10 p.m.) my son asked me about gender identity. We had a really good and important discussion, and I used both languages, code-switching from one to another to explain as much as possible.
I would love to hear your experiences with language and emotional resonance in the comments!
More Reads:
I loved this essay in
by and had so many feelings about this line especially:“Though my mother was a strict teacher, I learned “household” Vietnamese–a form I suspect many children of immigrants learn, able to form sentences like, “Can I have chicken tenders for dinner instead of your (delicious) crab noodle soup you spent all day laboring over?”
And as always,
If you’d like more resources on multilingualism and psychotherapy, here are some references from the talk I mention:
Costa, B. & Dewaele, J.-M. (2012) Psychotherapy across languages: beliefs, attitudes and practices of monolingual and multilingual therapists with their multilingual patients. Language and Psychoanalysis, 1, 18-40. A
Costa, B. & Dewaele, J.-M. (2019) The talking cure – building the core skills and the confidence of counsellors and psychotherapists to work effectively with multilingual patients through training and supervision. Counselling and Psychotherapy Research, 19, 231–240.
Rolland, L., Dewaele, J.-M. & Costa, B. (2017) Multilingualism and psychotherapy: Exploring multilingual clients' experiences of language practices in psychotherapy. International Journal of Multilingualism, 14, 69-85.
Rolland, L., Costa, B., & Dewaele, J.-M. (2021) Negotiating the language(s) for psychotherapy talk: A mixed methods study from the perspective of multilingual clients. Counselling and Psychotherapy Research, 21(1), 107-117.
See more academic references above from the talk.