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Two languages = double universe?

As you already know, language influences the way that we see the world around us. Each of you perceives various aspects of your sourroundings a bit differently. But what happens when somebody has two mother tongues? How does he or she perceive the world? And what about people who learned a second language in their adult life?

First of all, we need to notice the difference between learning language as a mother tongue and in adulthood. The truth is that we (people who started studying languages at school) rarely achieve native-speaker's fluency. Even if we spend enormously lot of time and effort on this activity. The thing is that babies have this amazing ability to acquire every natural language that exists in our world exceptionally fast. Some studies on 11 moths babies (where the magnetoencephalography technology has beed used) have shown that they can process sounds of two languages that they are affected even before they actually start producing sounds. Isn't it incredible? For adults it is not such an easy thing.

Bilinguals has possibility of code-mixing - using two languages in the same phrase or longer statement combining the knowledge about gramatical rules of these two languages (not as easy as you may think!). What is more, the perception of time, space and colours is also different. It depends mainly on the structures of acquired languages.

But does it mean that learning a second language as adult doesn't change anything? Not in the least! Panos Athanasopoulus, of New Castle University, has made a very interesting experiment on English speakers who were learning Japanese. He focused on the perception of colour blue because Japanese language distinguishes more between light and dark blue - there are two different words to name something that English users consider as two types of one colour. This research has shown that speakers who use Japan more frequently than English make this distinction more visibly.

According to the scientist, As well as learning vocabulary and grammar you're also unconsciously learning a whole new way of seeing the world. There's an inextricable link between language, culture and cognition. (link)

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