Symptoms of Living with a Foreign Language

Over fifteen years ago in Peru, on my first trip outside the United States, I fell extremely ill.  Body aches, high fever, vomiting, and dry heaving for more than one day. I reached an existence of delirium; of feeling inhuman. The only thing I could do was be sick.

  As I sweated and rolled and heaved, I began mumbling words that sounded like gibberish, but then they became words that sounded like other languages – a little German there, a little Spanish there… I weird ability gained while having a high fever. I found myself chuckling as I listened to my voice transmitting a mish mash of languages.

Fast forward to a few months ago in Taiwan. I caught myself a little stomach bug and once again, I found myself in a state of wretchedness for about 48 hrs. I laid in bed, feverish, laughing, and talking to myself. But not in English. I was speaking in some kind of strange all-encompassing language; clippings of Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, and German.

After I recovered, I thought how my ramblings reminded me about the linguist Noam Chomsky and his theory; that we as humans all innately carried basic constructs of grammar and that only through experience does a formal language develop. It made me imagine that perhaps  I was speaking some kind of mono-language or a proto-language, or that what sounded like nonsense to my ears was closer to actual sentences or phrases than I thought because I had been surrounded by a language for six months at that point.

Language is a virus.

It infects; beginning as something small and intangible. Then it duplicates, over and over. Finally, it spreads.

This analogy is something that linguists have built upon. Seeing the spread of bits of information, symbols, or ideas similar to how viruses spread was the theoretical model behind memetics (the study of memes; originated from the Greek mimeme, and memes are essentially the smallest units of transmittable culture).

Living within a foreign language, in a foreign country, an infection of sorts does occur.   The language, along with the ideas, psychologies, and philosophies behind it, infect your ways of thinking and communicating.  The constant bombardment of a foreign language taxes your brain and speech. If you are a person even half-determined to learn the language, you are more susceptible.

For your education, here are some symptoms of what happens to those who come down with the language virus.

1.Spastic moments where you lose your native speech sophistication. Vocabulary

   may decrease or be slow to recall.

2.An increased need for quietness. Language infection may cause listening    

hypersensitivity which may lead to exhaustion.

3.Moments of slowed cognition or memory recall.  Similarly, you may find yourself being more tongue-tied or tripping over words more frequently. 

4.Cadence, rhythm, or patterns of speech may alter with increased exposure to foreign language

5.Increase in the comprehension of body language and its interpretation (many times I have not been able to even closely get what someone is saying but due to the cadence in the rhythms of body language I could tell what someone was trying to communicate).