Linguistic Soup, by Carly Meador

            An interesting concept to me, is the acquisition of language through the lens of cultural psychology, social psychology, and developmental psychology. Travelling around various places in Europe, I feel as though I am swimming in language soup, and that it is always changing around me, I can never seem to adapt. I travel from Spain to Germany and I try to speak Spanish to everyone that I know cannot speak English to me, but speaking Spanish to them is a less successful means of communication. I go to France and pick up the term “merci” for thank you, and I cant seem to fit the context to the language so now I interchange, “thank you”, “gracias”, “merci”, and German “Danke”. It seems my mind is always shifting gears and I perceive my Spanish is getting worse because of it. In a cultural mishmosh I am acquiring a strange accent from who knows where. So my question is, what is the psychology of a brain shifting gears in language. How do those that speak fluently multiple languages jump around in this pool of confusion and manage to use the correct terms? What language do they think in? How do the languages run together into a sort of Spanglish, or germanch (german-french), or for the sake of cultural language soup (spanglishermanch)? Spanglishermanch is what I hear in my head and I cant even seem to make sense of my own thoughts as all these unrecognizable sounds buzz around my head. Foreign vowels, harsh constant sounds, differing gestures and body language. The struggle of communication! It is interesting to me that I have been able to deduce a person’s origin or native language based on their body language from meters away without hearing the sounds. I can see how widely they open their mouths, pick up what vowel sounds seem to be accented and formed by their lips, and although I don’t understand them or hear them, at least I can deduce an origin that’s something right? The last thing that I find quite interesting is the acquisition of language in children. Blank canvases learning from immersion in the language for their entire lives. I can see how their accents are formed in how they learn to produce each of the sounds by shaping their mouths. It is so different in every place and I am so utterly impressed by their ability to say words that I could never dream of pronouncing. Impressed by their ability to speak multiple languages already at such a young age. They’ve grown up in the cultural-lingua-mishmosh that I am finding myself in now. I would be extremely interested to see how the gears turn inside their little heads when switching between languages. Is this a simple task inert to those who learn the skill very young? Do they think in multiple languages? Is thought intrinsically linguistic or are thoughts merely ideas without a linguistic form? All questions of a budding cultural psychologist.