Amanda Kruel from Knoxville, Tennessee, wrote to say that ten years after learning French, she was studying German and her mind would jump from German to French, instead of English, when she was at a loss for a word. This is known as faulty language selection, and it happens to a lot of polyglots. A Florida community-college professor blogging at Sarah on Sabbatical has a nice roundup of research on the topic. She relates her own experience of working in a hotel in Bavaria and not being able to translate to French for some tourists, even though she spoke French. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Faulty Language Selection”
You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.
I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette.
Amanda Kruel of Knoxville, Tennessee, wrote us to say that she has a weird thing happening and she wonders if she’s the only one.
Amanda learned French about 10 years ago, and now she’s learning German.
But here’s the weird part.
She will start a sentence in German, but if she gets stuck and can’t think of the German words, then her brain’s natural tendency is to go to French, not English.
She says, when grasping for the German words that aren’t on that top shelf in my mind, French filler feels more appropriate than English.
In other words, if she can’t think of a German phrase, it’s as if her brain knows that it’s supposed to be looking for a language that isn’t English.
And so it reaches for French.
And it turns out that she’s not alone and that linguists talk about what they call faulty language selection.
It’s not that polyglots don’t know the correct words. They just can’t produce them.
And it almost always happens while they’re speaking, not while they’re writing.
It’s pretty common.
Interesting.
Do you have this problem?
Not so much.
I mean, I don’t speak three languages actively, but I’ve talked to friends who have this problem, people who speak more than one language.
And there’s actually a really interesting blog called Sarah on Sabbatical that’s run by Sarah Melanson, who’s a professor at Valencia Community College in Florida.
And she writes about how years ago she took a job at a hotel in Bavaria.
And at that time, her strongest foreign language was French.
And some tourists from France needed a translator.
So, of course, she goes running up to help.
And for the life of her, she couldn’t stop translating into German for them.
And she actually had to stop and just write down her answers in French.
And you hear this again and again that somehow the languages kind of short-circuit each other out.
And it may be because of where our brain stores extra languages.
You know, it’s different if you grow up bilingual.
If you’re a little kid and you’re learning two different languages at one time, it gets stored in one particular part of the brain.
But if you learn a language later, the second language gets stored in a slightly different area of the brain.
The brain is a strange organ, isn’t it?
Yes.
And I’m very curious to know if other listeners of ours have had those experiences.
Yeah, I’d love to hear from the people who speak more than two languages.
What’s it like to have four or five languages at the tip of your tongue and yet keep them sorted, keep them solved?
Yeah.
Particularly people who are professional translators.
Mm-mm—
Yeah, a friend of mine describes it as flipping through a mental Rolodex, you know, when you’re looking for them.
I wonder if there’s a gap there, a pause while you reconfigure, right?
A slight one, yeah.
Tell us.
We want to know, how are the languages working out for you?
Three, four, five, however many it is.
How’s that working out for you?
Email words@waywordradio.org.
