If someone learns a new language and speaks it exclusively does the voice of his internal diaglogue change as well?
Take Arnold Schwarzenegger for example, i think his native language was Austrian, bt he probably has not had occasion to have to use it in a long time. Do you think the thoughts that are in his head throughout the day are in English or Austrian?
Austrian?
I’m pretty sure he doesn’t think in Austrian.
There is no Austrian language, just an Austrian dialect of German.
Ephraim Kishon, the late Israeli writer born in Hungary, once commented that he was dreaming in Hebrew, but with Hungarian subtitles. It was surely meant as a joke, but I think there’s some truth to it: After soem time, your internal dialog changes to some sort of mixture.
I’m a native speaker of German, and I have never lived abroad permanently so far (it’s going to change this year), but there were times when I was speaking English during a large percentage of my time, e.g. during trips abroad. My internal dialog was still mostly German, but there were certain notions which I could express, even to myself, more easily in English than in German.
To be honest I find it very hard to speak one language and think in another - actually having to translate on the fly is hard. I think most people who are truly multilingual flip from one language to another both verbally and mentally (and from what I see, physically too - watch those hands waving when people switch to French).
Pretty much.
I had the good fortune of being born into a bilingual family and, although these days most of my thoughts are in English, when I used to spend summers in Poland, my internal dialogue would generally revert to Polish. I still have the occasional dream in Polish and speaking in Polish does not require any interim step of thinking in English, translating, then speaking in Polish.
Actually, even in languages I’m nowhere near fluent in but have spent a lot of time around, like Hungarian, when I speak, it will not be through a conscious translation step. In other words, I form Hungarian sentences as Hungarian sentences, without thinking of the English words first. I would also dream in some bastard form of Hungarian every once in awhile, as well. But this is also because Hungarian does not do well in word-for-word translations with English. However, when I was learning Croatian, I’d basically sketch up the sentences in Polish in my head and then just drop the Croatian words in place, since the sentence structure was so similar and speaking Croatian was largely a matter of using different words with a very similar underlying grammar. So my internal dialogue in Croatia was Polish much of the time.
I would suspect by this time, Arnold’s thoughts are probably a mixture of the two languages, if not completely English, but that’s just speculation based on my personal experience.
I don’t know about others, but I often think in pictures, and then choose a language to describe the pictures in. The output language is secondary.
I found that while I was in Italy some of my internal dialog was in Italian, but I wasn’t fluent enough to have all of it in Italian. Sometimes it was a more or less conscious choice, sometimes it was more or less spontaneous. Sometimes I think it was a sort of mixture between the two that is hard to describe.
Susan Gal had a really interesting study of Hungarian/German bilinguals in small town in Austria. She asked them what language they used with different interlocutors, like grandparents, government officials, and God. (A chart of her results can be found on page 161 in this google book.) I know that other studies looked at what language multilinguals do things like dream, count, and talk to themselves. There are some general patterns, if I remember correctly, but a lot of it is idiosyncratic.
ETA: This is **liberty3701 **… accidentally posted as my husband!
I agree with the other posters. I never think in Hindi and speak in English, or very rarely anyway. If I’m thinking in Hindi, it comes out in Hindi. I only rarely have to translate and that’s mostly for words I’ve always known in one language or another.
Funny thing is, most of the time I curse in English, and they say the language you curse in is your “native” language…but English is my second language. If you really catch me by surprise, I will answer in Hindi, and have.
I do dream in Hindi occasionally. If I spend a lot of time watching Hindi flicks, talking to my family, or writing in Hindi, my thoughts will switch over to Hindi after a while.
One thing I noticed about speakers of Sub-Continental languages in the UK (not sure which languages, sorry - wouldn’t know Hindi from a hole in the ground) is that they often seem, when speaking in the other language, to switch to English mid-stream in order to curse. So the conversation sounds, to me, something like “blahblahblahblahblah FUCK YOU! blahblahblahblah SUCK SWEAT BITCH! blahblahblah”
Scots Gaelic speakers seem to do this too, although it’s not usually to curse. That sounds more like “acheeacheeacheeachee battery shaver acheeacheeachee television acheeacheeachee Head and Shoulders Greasy Formula…”
Even if you don’t become fluent, your thoughts begin to switch over for simple phrases when you have to use them all the time. My Japanese is crap, but I still don’t translate things like “are you ok?” from English to Japanese in my head before I say it; it starts as Japanese.
The most confusing for me is when I have to speak two languages that aren’t my native one. Even though my French is far far better than my Japanese, when I went to Japanese restaurants in Paris (leading me to ask for “mizu, s’il vous plait”), or try to speak to Francophones here in Japan, the words would come up in Japanese (if I knew them) before they would in French, just because I’ve been using Japanese much more and more recently. In those situations, English would often take a seat way in the back row of my head.
I sometimes have internal dialogue in Spanish, but it’s the everyday, ingrained stuff I don’t have to think about. When having a conversation in Spanish of any topic that requires thinking, my internal dialogue is principally English. I don’t have to “translate” into Spanish, though; unless I have to think of a word or explain something I don’t have a word or phrase for, it just comes out fluidly without any real though. And many, many cases, my thoughts just aren’t expressed in words. Not a quick way to internally verbalize a complex engineering problem, for example.
I sometimes dream in, and talk to myself in, other languages.
There’s a strong case to be made that you don’t “think” in any human language. Rather, you internally vocalize your thoughts in a language before you express them. Hence the (for some) frequent sense of not being able to think of the correct word to express what you mean.
We’ve discussed this topic at length in other GQ threads. A quick search for “Pinker” should track one or more of them down.
I’ve dreamt in french and Esperanto. At least, they seemed like French and Esperanto at the time. Heck, I’ve dreamt in programming languages. (G, the graphical language used in Labview, to be precise. It was during an intense project at work.)
My dreams tend to be like moves, always with colour, often with sound, and sometimes touch and smell, and very occasionally taste. I have dreamed in animation, like moving drawings printed on and pressed into paper. (And during that dream, a part of me was exploring the drawing style…)
I do that, too, specially when I’m solving a problem; I sometimes joke that Spanish is my second language and the first one is pictures. But if I’m writing I think in the language I’m using. One of the things I hate most, as it kind of makes my brain try to go in three directions at once, is when I’m working in one language and someone adresses me in another, ARGH!
In a bilingual group, you always end up coming with a pidgin made up of “whichever way is shorter in each language.” Efficiency ftw! 
According to that rule, no speaker of Basque has Basque as his native language and I (who didn’t start speaking Catalan until age 21) have Catalan as co-native. Yeah rite.
(Sorry, over time)
I think in whatever language I’m using, and I’m not even fully bilingual in either Japanese or Spanish. According to linguistics studies, there does seem to be some kind of meta-language that we use to conceptualize things, which we then put into a regular human language.
When I translate, it goes from words in L1, to concept, to words in L2. Since there’s usually no one-to-one correspondence, that’s the only practical way to think about it. If I don’t have a way to say the concept I want to express in the target language, then things break down and I have to find a way around the block, but even then I flail in that language for a bit before falling back to my native English when I just can’t find a way to express what I mean. I get stuck at finding the words to go from the concept stage, but I don’t think of things in English first.
What Nava said is right on. There are times when things are easier, more fitting in nuance, or shorter to say in a secondary language. Even when I’m with friends who are native English speakers we’ll sometimes use Japanese because it works better for the situation. Some of my relatives by marriage are native or fluent Spanish speakers, and they’ll occasionally mix all three languages; Japanese, Spanish, and English, depending on what they want to say.
Cursing is much more satisfying in Spanish or English than in Japanese. Japanese lacks a lot of really meaty ways of saying things, although there are a few nice disgusting sexual descriptions and slang phrases that I use sometimes.
If I’m speaking Spanish, then my internal monologue is in Spanish. Same for English. If I’m speaking with another bilingual English / Spanish speaker, we both switch back and forth between the two while speaking, even within the same sentence.
Oddly, though, the drunker I get the more the Spanish comes out.
As far as obscenity, I’m still more comfortable in English (and I think we have some wonderful profanity), but Spanish is good too.