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Linguistics in Everyday Life Linguistics is not a topic that most people consider to be a part of their life. It is strange to think that someone can overlook something as fundamentally basic as the language that they think and communicate with. An interesting question for bilinguals is, "What language do you think in?". The line of languages inside one's own head is much more blurred than the average monolingual. Someone who only knows one language will usually only think in that one language. A bilingual; however, will think in one or the other language, or perhaps both together. This also can be further investigated by means of when the learner learned said languages and how similar the language is to their own native one. For example, a native English speaker learns Korean at the age of twenty, it is unlikely that they think in Korean. But if that same speaker learns German at the same age, it is more likely that they will think in some German because of the similarity between the two languages. The most interesting is when a child is raised speaking two languages. For example, a child is raised in a household that uses both English and German regularly; that child will grow up to have bilingual thoughts. This idea is a variation of code-switching that occurs when a person switches from speaking one language to another (Poplack 1980). It is something that comes very natural to someone bilingual, but it something that seems completely ludicrous to monolinguals (Vorozhbitova 2010). The idea is the same when compared to weight lifting. If you go to the gym and see someone lifting two hundred plus pounds, an average person would be amazed. But anyone can lift two hundred pounds, or code-switch. It's all matter of practice and then it is just muscle memory. What happens is that the brain completely switches from one language to another in less than a second. Someone fluent in both languages is not translating from one language to another, but actually speaking and thinking in two different language (Lim 2014). It

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is not something that any one is able to do. It takes years of learning and teaching your brain not to translate. Even then, if a thirty year old decides to pick up a language, it is unlikely that they will ever be able to speak and think without translating from their native language. This is because the brain is already fully formed, the ideal time to learn languages is as young as possible because the brain is still able to take in the information without an outside source (Evans 2006). Think about how you learn a language in today's world, "Mother = Mutter", you learn by translating from your native language to the foreign language. Because you learn a second language off of the base of a native language, your brain makes the connections from the native language to the new language. That's not to say that it is a bad way to learn a language, it will just make fluency more difficult because your brain is used to translating. Now think about how a baby learns their first language, they see a chair and they hear someone call it a chair. And if you introduce a second language to a still developing brain, it is absorbed in the same manner instead of building off of another language (Jakobson 1960). This allows the brain to use both languages in a cohesive manner, allowing someone to think in two or more languages at once.

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References Evans, Vyvyan & Green, Melanie (2006), Cognitive linguistics: An introduction. PsycINFO, 830. 19 June 2014. Jakobson, Roman (1960), Closing statement: Linguistics and Poetics. Style in Language 19 June 2014 Lim, J., Loi, C., & Hashim, A. (2014). Postulating hypotheses in experimental doctoral dissertations on Applied Linguistics: A qualitative investigation into rhetorical shifts and linguistic mechanisms. Iberica, 27, 121-142. 19 June 2014. Poplack, Shana.(1980) Sometimes I’ll start a sentence in Spanish Y TERMINO EN ESPAÑOL: toward a typology of code-switching. Linguistics, 18, 7-8. 19 June 2014 Vorozhbitova, Alexandra A & Issina, Gaukhar.(2010) Linguistic and Rhetorical Picture of the World of Collective Linguistic Personality as the Basic Discourse-universe of Ethnocultural and Educational Space. European Researcher, 67, 156-162. 19 June 2014.

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