Bilingualism has recently become a major issue and a valuable one because in comparison with monolingualism it allows people to live between two worlds, two cultures, adopting the specific ways of thinking and feeling of the people they come into contact. To be bilingual involves more than speaking another language than your own, it is all about the inner significance of words apparently similar in two languages but deeply different, this is a major issue analysed by Anna Wierzbicka who strongly develops all the implications of this subject in the article Bilingual lives, bilingual experience. Firstly, as the name of the article suggests, to be bilingual would mean to split yourself between two different ways of life adopting the basic concepts
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For instance, I often easily express my feelings towards people I have close relationships with by using English words instead of Romanian because I think that in Romanian the words people use for expressing their own feelings do not have a valuable meaning, they are just simple words without an emotional content. I often hear people talking on the telephone saying almost three times during a conversation that they love the interlocutor as if they would insist on saying ‘I am hungry when they suffer from hunger’ and so the Romanian word te iubesc with its equivalent I love you in English has become a monster for me. The result of this is that I often feel embarrassed to tell someone I love te iubesc because I am not sure about the emotional power of this word anymore. Instead I will use for sure the English equivalent of i love you or the German one of ich liebe dich because these really mean something connected with emotions and true feelings.
Aneta Pavlenko also seems to disagree with Anna Wierzbicka as regards this statement as long as in her book Bilingualism and emotions she states that: “Other multilinguals acknowledge being emotionally attracted to their new languages which allow them to perform new and different emotional selves.” Her declaration involves the change of role and also the change of self when speaking a new language, an issue I have already talked about at the beginning from the point of view of the multilingual German sinologue Cristoph
For instance, I often easily express my feelings towards people I have close relationships with by using English words instead of Romanian because I think that in Romanian the words people use for expressing their own feelings do not have a valuable meaning, they are just simple words without an emotional content. I often hear people talking on the telephone saying almost three times during a conversation that they love the interlocutor as if they would insist on saying ‘I am hungry when they suffer from hunger’ and so the Romanian word te iubesc with its equivalent I love you in English has become a monster for me. The result of this is that I often feel embarrassed to tell someone I love te iubesc because I am not sure about the emotional power of this word anymore. Instead I will use for sure the English equivalent of i love you or the German one of ich liebe dich because these really mean something connected with emotions and true feelings.
Aneta Pavlenko also seems to disagree with Anna Wierzbicka as regards this statement as long as in her book Bilingualism and emotions she states that: “Other multilinguals acknowledge being emotionally attracted to their new languages which allow them to perform new and different emotional selves.” Her declaration involves the change of role and also the change of self when speaking a new language, an issue I have already talked about at the beginning from the point of view of the multilingual German sinologue Cristoph