Summary Of Bilingual Experiences By Anna Wierzbicka

Due to globalization, modern technology, easier ways to communicate and travel, the concept of multilingualism has become a necessity and has spread rapidly in the last period of time. Scientist, more precisely, psychological scientists, have started analyzing bilinguals in order to see if there are any differences in the way they think, behave and if speaking multiple languages affects them. They soon reached the conclusion that there are shifts in bilinguals’ personality and even their brains suffer changes. Emotions, expressing and interpreting them, also differ in the case of a bilingual person, as research shows.
In her article, “Bilingual Lives, Bilingual Experiences”, Anna Wierzbicka explores this exact topic. She states that when
Stefano Puntoni of the Rotterdam School of Management noticed that “people who were perfectly polite and proper in Italian swore like sailors when they spoke English — probably because the curse words didn’t feel as emotional in a foreign language.”
Bilinguals often find it difficult to express their emotions in a foreign language, firstly, doe to the lack of equivalents from their native language.
Anna Wierzbicka, in her article “Bilingual Lives, Bilingual Experience” compares her mother-tongue, Polish, with English. In her native language, the phrase “Nie gniewaj sie˛ (na mnie)” roughly can be translated in English with “Don’t be angry (with me)”, but has a more subtle meaning which can be explained like this: “I don’t want you to feel bad feelings towards me”, and implies a close relationship with the other person. This detail, unknown by her daughters led to misunderstandings and miscommunication with them, until each explained what bothered the other one when using this
But this is not the only reason. Another reason is that Polish words that I could use to talk about my baby granddaughter do not have exact semantic equivalents in English and therefore feel irreplaceable. For example, I could say in Polish that she is rozkoszna, using a word glossed in Polish-English dictionaries as ‘delightful’, but I couldn’t possibly use the word delightful about her myself not only because delightful has no emotional force for me but because its meaning, which is not identical with that of rozkoszna, doesn’t fit my way of thinking and feeling about this baby.

Also, other bilingual complained about this incapability to express the exact emotions that they feel, that there is a gap between what people say and how they feels when expressing emotions in English.
Sarah experiences a distance when expressing her emotions in her L2, English. She compares this distance to having some sort of disability in that she can neither feel her emotions to the fullest nor own her emotional experience. In other words, while Sarah is juggling between identifying and expressing an emotion on the one hand, and finding the appropriate English words and expressions on the other, the experience itself is