Howdy Folks,
From talking with many neurodivergent people throughout life, and finding community among those who have a fascination with linguistics…
Are any of you deeply interested in the subject? If so, what first sparked your curiosity? What abilities did you hope to acquire?
To connect with a wider group of people? To read ancient languages, or perhaps to win your favorite scrabble competition in a tongue you can’t speak?
I’m curious, as it feels like language learners form a spectrum of their own. For me, it helps contextualize so many facets of life, and has widened my world of friends and literacy.
Plus, it’s fun to know what someone may be thinking in their native tongue when speaking your mother language.
Living in a foreign country whose language I spoke for 15+ years from childhood gave me a huge shock, when I realized psychology and phrasing play a larger role in communication than just a daisy chain of words.
Makes me wonder how peculiar my own accent(s) / phrasing sound to their respective natives. One of my favorites it when speaking Spanish, is to accidentally declare that you are pregnant instead of embarrassed… Makes the correction twice as effective! Or when a man in German expressing his love for Hummer cars is not actually professing passion for lobsters 🦞
For those of you whose native language isn’t English… Have you had any mismatched moments like this? What funny things have you heard English learners mismatch?
-G
Conversely, why aren’t neurotypical people, who also extensively use language in their lives, also curious about it? Is it a disability that impairs abstract thought, or are they too busy cheering on their sports teams or thinking about the love lives of celebrities or something?
I mean, there’s definitely also some neurotypicals that put lots of skill points into languages. I could imagine that auties are more fascinated by the rulesets, whereas for neurotypicals these tend to rather just be a means to an end…?
That’s a great point. The largest reason I’ve heard from monolingual people by choice, is that English is a language that everyone else will learn, and that language only exists as some type of information transport medium. For me, grasping the rules and structure is the fun part!
Before I became more confident in German, to the point where people wouldn’t immediately switch to ENglish when speaking to me… “It will be easier for you” is a very common Germanism that I heard.
The French would stare with daggers, while a Korean colleague of mine was delighted to help me with my absolutely broken Korean. The individual definitely plays a large role, as well as the familiarity between the two languages.