In how many languages do you know how to say ‘I love you’? In St Andrews, you’ll overhear at least three before your coffee arrives. Picture this: it’s 8:40 in the morning, and you’re waiting on the corner outside Taste. Wrapped up warm against the morning wind drifting down West Sands and cutting down North Street, you’re one of many in a sea of students looking for their caffeine fix before the god-awful, long-dreaded 9 am tutorial slot. Leaking through your wires is a flurry of distinct accents and a melange of languages unique to the headline-making, highly international demographic that is the students of St Andrews. It’s simply a part of the symphony of this town to hear students switching between 2 or 3 dialects mid-conversation, navigating linguistic transitions and translations with such smoothness and casual ease that it’s almost irritating to an erstwhile bilingual, who can now only slur a semblance of fluent French when under the influence.
The nature of this melting pot of language and culture that is KY16 means it’s rare to avoid the age-old rift between partners with different mother tongues. My God, can you really call yourself a St Andrews student if you’ve never downloaded Duolingo for someone you ignore at the Union the next month? In a dating pool that’s so international, sometimes it can seem like the ocean between our partners (or most commonly situationships) and us isn’t just physical. This can seem incredibly daunting. Doesn’t every self-proclaimed “dating coach” on social media call communication the cornerstone of any relationship? It may feel like multilingual connections are ill-fated by no fault of their own, and it’s hard to imagine that there’s a whole other version of the person you feel so close to that you can’t understand. That locked away by language, there’s an inaccessible and intimate inner world they have to filter through, parts of their personality that don’t translate, a semantic grey area you’ll never be able to interact with directly.
This flexibility and variation in personality are actually phenomena of polyglots, supported by multiple psycholinguistic studies. In 2006, research showed that when English foreign language (EFL) participants communicated in English rather than their mother tongue, their behavior and expressed sentiments shifted, becoming more easygoing or extraverted, which the study links to “Americanised” cultural traits. Similarly, an older study from the 1960s observed a distinct difference in responses to the same question depending on whether the women involved were speaking Japanese or English, again bringing to the fore that language does shape our communication of ideas and opinions, that even if we hold the same opinion in both dialects, it can be received differently by the person listening to us. In her article for the New Yorker, Lauren Collins writes of this psycholinguistic circumstance, where the mother tongue is considered the most faithful expression of the inner self and instinctual vehicle for self-expression, citing those knee-jerk reactions that are a reflex without translation, like swearing in said language when stubbing a toe or even at the moment of orgasm. Connections are much less straightforward. If the truest version of the self lives in a single language, then every act of translation is, in some small way, a compromise.
The very acts of communication and self-expression are battles in themselves, and, irritatingly, the pursuit of connection rests on our ability to distill our inner workings into something understandable and tangible for the people we love to grasp. I’m reminded of this quote from David Foster Wallace in his novel The Pale King, that bridges the profound limitation of language and inadequacy of communication, he writes: “How odd I can have all this inside me and to you it’s just words,”. It’s all too familiar for most of us here, the frustration of having such a trivial barrier between your complex inner world and the person you wish to understand it most intimately. Can you ever fully know someone without understanding the words that the scripture of their soul is written in? Can you really speak directly from the heart if you’re translating it first? It’s the most silent heartbreak with the loudest of repercussions.
This is the leitmotif of Past Lives (2023), which, at its core, tells the story of the timeless, enduring friction between people and places. I find one of the most poignant lines of the film to be “You dream in a language that I can’t understand. It’s like there’s this whole place inside of you where I can’t go.” It can’t think of a better way to express the enduringly uncomfortable feeling of being a perpetual foreigner to someone’s internal world. The distances experienced in multicultural relationships span more than time differences and air miles; they also encompass the proximity of cultural and linguistic dimensions that make us who we are. It’s hard as a partner to know that you can never broach the certain familiarity and comfort of the mother tongue. It’s not something that can be replicated or translated, being swaddled in the sanctuary that is the language your parents crooned above your cradle, or that your tiny mouth was shaped and molded to before any other.
But transcending this, French-American literary critic George Steiner wrote that every human interaction is a feat of translation and interpretation. In his musings, he concludes that each individual has their own private language, or “idiolect”, and curating relationships involves a constant process of translating this inner world into any of the million permutations of language. These translations across worlds are not limited to linguistic bounds, but extend to other traits of identity. In the most binary sense, Steiner concludes that we communicate and seek a state of shared understanding and intimacy across social categories such as “scientist/artist, atheist/believer, man/woman“. So with this perspective, how can cross-cultural or linguistic connections feel so uniquely daunting?
I think there’s a certain myopia in seeing only the intimidating barriers and shortcomings of such connections, and an intimacy in trying to understand a fundamental part of someone.
You’re foreign to you. In my experience, although powerful, language barriers are futile in the face of true human connection. I’ve felt more deeply understood by people who stumble through plural forms or don’t understand sarcasm on the first try than those who, at age 3, learned the same alphabet as me. Sentiment always seeps through the cracks of conjugation and muddled-up idioms. Perhaps the extra effort and attention make these exchanges all the more meaningful. I knew a couple in high school who were bilingual in Thai and English. Whenever they experienced conflict, they communicated in Thai because it forced them to be more deliberate in their word choice, avoiding the damage caused by throwaway comments hurled in anger. In a multilinguistic connection, you gain the unique ability to broach and supersede the barriers of your own language, to learn phrases that fit what you want to say in a way you never knew how, and in some cases, find parts of yourself you never knew existed because you didn’t have the words to name them. There is so much poetic value in the specific idiosyncrasies of each language, like how expressing the feeling of missing someone in French translates directly to “you are missing from me”, or in Vietnamese, the word for missing someone, nhớ, is the same as remembering them.
In a similar sense, there’s a beauty we are bestowed with in multilingual relationships, an almost godlike opportunity for creation where we invent a unique linguistic and cultural microcosm of expression. There’s something so intimate about a shared vocabulary and personal “love language” between two people, which Alain de Botton touches on in his book On Love, explaining that “Familiarity creates a new language, an in-house language of intimacy that carries reference to the story the two lovers are weaving together, and others cannot readily understand that.” Isn’t that what Love is at its core? This creation of a deeply personal and private dimension with another. In the back of my mind, all I can hear is Greta Gerwig and her famous monologue in Frances Ha, telling us that Love creates “…this secret world that exists right there in public, unnoticed, that no one else knows about. It’s sort of like how they say that other dimensions exist all around us, but we can’t perceive them.”
Freddie Braun writes a beautiful perspective on the evolution of language and cultural integration in a globalised world, he reminds us that the only constant in life is change, and the same goes for Love, and how we express it. He cites the uniquely American ubiquity of “I love you” in casual conversation, to the point where, for our cross-Atlantic counterparts, the way it drips off the tongue is considered “a daily phenomenon”, much to the shock of other cultures, where it’s a much more intense and weighty declaration. Think the clear German distinction between “Ich liebe dich” (“I love you”), for romantic partners, and “Ich hab’ dich lieb” (“I’m fond of you”). His beautiful openness and ease of expression are trickling across cultures and languages, causing a notable shift where wo ai ni (“I love you”) is becoming more integrated into the daily vocabularies in Chinese teenagers, unheard of for previous generations, according to Braun, who calls it “a cultural shift of epic proportions“.
While we battle the discrepancies between diction, denotation, and connotation, the pursuit of human connection is indomitable. Whether platonic or romantic, mere scripture and idiomatic expression pale against its face that is older than any prehistoric alphabet. It isn’t convenient to translate your soul to someone you so desperately want to understand you, but it is a labor of Love. On this end, I know the twang can be grating, but bridge the gap with the American dialect. nd sack the measly Duolingo streak and go on a coffee date at Taste, because the best way to master a language is to fall in Love with a native speaker. Inn St Andrews, we walk away with not just a diploma and wellies that we wear once a year, but an arsenal of international “I love you.”
The first form of scripture, cave paintings, depicted human connection itself,