Unilingualism is Boring

Living in a foreign country where the language of majority is a world away from my mother tongue, I am forced to think about the importance of language on a daily basis.

Language has always fascinated me, and it has always been one of my biggest interests. But the relationship I have had with language is somewhat of a love-hate one, because as much as I love learning things about language and learning new languages, it's not something I'm particularly good at, and it takes me longer than most people to achieve any sort of proficiency. But that's not what this post is about.

When living in Montreal, the language of the majority was, once again, not my mother tongue. So although I would speak English with my friends and family, listen to English music, watch English TV, and be an all-round English person, the world outside my front door was conducted in a different language altogether. And because of this, I believe my sense of language is a little warped.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing, though.

A few months ago, a French friend and I were walking around Tokyo and talking about the annoyances of being automatically assumed as English-speaking Americans just because we're white. According to her, such assumptions are upsetting because she's not supposed to speak English, because she's not even from an English-speaking country. I, on the other hand, am supposed to be a bilingual individual.

The more I think about it, the more she really has a point in what she was saying.

Growing up in Montreal, I have become dependant on two languages. I am significantly more dependant on my mother tongue, however, I am incapable of limiting my thoughts and emotions to one language. There are some things I can only say in French, and others which I can only say in English.

But these last few months, because I have almost no French-speaking friends, I have had to think more in English than ever before, which is sort of weird.

At the same time, much like things were not in English back home, because of my constant exposure to Japanese everywhere I go, I'm having a lot of trouble expressing myself in English these days. I watch TV in Japanese. I listen to Japanese music. All the signs around me are in Japanese. People speaking in the street are speaking Japanese. Although the output is still mainly English, the input is almost exclusively Japanese. Due to the lack of exposure, English words are no longer readily-available to me, and my brain thinks in Japanese sentence structure. With my friends here, I jokingly speak Japlish and get my message across quite well, but when it comes to speaking to friends and family back home, all of a sudden I feel somewhat distressed.

I remember back in my Language Acquisition class back in university learning about kids who could hear, but had two deaf parents. Even if they left the TV on all day, that would never be enough exposure to a language to make it the child's mother tongue or for the child to really acquire it. This being said, I feel like that's what's happened to me all my life. I was never exposed to enough English for me to be able to rely on it 100% to express myself. There has always been another language in my life to provide a supplementary list of vocabulary.

I wonder if it's possible for someone who has been exposed to multiple languages since childhood to fully rely on one language. I feel like my English is not 100% as natural as the English that my friends speak and there are a lot of commonly used English words and expressions that I honestly do not understand. But because of my abilities to use other languages, I believe that I haven't quite missed out. Because if you combine all the words I know in all my languages, I must have enough to make up one complete language, right? Who says my way of speaking has to be comprehensible by others?