How many languages can your brain recognise ‘I love you’ in?
In St Andrews, you’ll overhear at least three before your coffee arrives. Picture this, it’s another brisk morning in the Bubble and you’re wrapped up warm against the rising wind that drifts across West Sands and cuts down North Street. Huddled in the doorway of Taste, you’re one of many in a sea of students looking for their caffeine fix before the god-awful, long-dreaded 9am tutorial slot. Leaking through your wires are 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 dialects mid-conversation, wielding linguistic transition and translation with such a smoothness and casual ease it’s almost irritating to a former and increasingly sporadic 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 that it’s a rarity 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 ignored at the Union the next month? In a dating pool that’s so international, sometimes it can seem like the ocean between us and our partners (or most commonly situationships) 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 that they have to filter themself through, parts of their personality that don’t translate, a semantic grey area that you’ll never be able to directly interact with.
This flexibility and variation in personality is actually a phenomenon of polyglots, backed by multiple psycholinguistic studies. In 2006, research showed that when English foreign language (EFL) participants communicated in English rather than their mother tongue, their behaviour and expressed sentiments shifted, becoming more easygoing or extraverted, which the study links as “Americanised” cultural traits. Similarly, an older study from the 1960s observed a distinct difference in responses to the exact 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 exclaiming in said language when stubbing a toe. If identity is so inextricably tied to instinctive language, does this mean that every act of translation is, in some small way, a compromise of connection?
Even without broaching bilinguality, aren’t the very acts of communication and self-expression battles in itself? Irritatingly, the pursuit of connection rests on our ability to extract our inner workings into something understandable and tangible for the people we love to grasp onto. 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 pencilled 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 cinematically tells the story of the timeless and 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,” and 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, but 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 moulded to before any other.
In a broader and more transcendent perspective, 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 involve a constant process of translating this inner world into any of the million permeations of language. These translations across worlds are not limited to linguistic bounds, but extend to other brackets of identity. In the most binary sense, Steiner concludes that we communicate and attempt a state of shared understanding and intimacy across social categories like “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 to only seeing the intimidating barriers and shortfalls of such connections, and an intimacy of trying to understand a part of someone that is fundamentally foreign to you. In my experience, although powerful, the barriers of language 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, aged 3, traced the same alphabet as me. Sentiment always seeps through the cracks of conjugation and muddled up idioms. Perhaps the extra effort and attention makes these exchanges all the more meaningful. I knew a couple in high school who were bilingual in Thai and English, and whenever they experienced conflict they communicated in Thai because it forced them to be more deliberate with their word choice, avoiding the damage of throwaway comments fired off 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, multilingual relationships bestow on us an almost godlike and sacred opportunity of 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 that cannot be readily understood by others.” 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 don’t have the ability to perceive them”.
To another end, 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 the way it drips off the tongue for our cross-Atlantic counterparts is considered “a daily phenomenon”, much to the shock of other cultures where it’s a much more intense and weighted declaration. Think of the German distinction between “Ich liebe dich” (“I love you”), for romantic partners, and “Ich hab’ dich lieb” (“I’m fond of you”). This beautiful openness and ease of tender expression is 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. Mere scripture and idiomatic expression pales against an endeavour, whether platonic or romantic, 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 labour of love. To this end, take the football/soccer “debate” on the chin and attempt a multilingual connection by talking to an American today. Then sack the measly Duolingo streak to go on a coffee date at Taste, because the best way to master a language is to fall in love with a native speaker, and in St Andrews, we walk away with not just a diploma and welly boots that we wear once a year, but an arsenal of international translations of affection.