//In Everything Else
Thinking language
When you're fluent in more than one language, which one do you think in?
Sinhala is my native language. For the first few years of my life, growing up in Sri Lanka, it’s all I spoke. Ours was a monolingual household—my parents didn’t speak any other languages. Starting in kindergarten, and all the way through school, I learned English, as most other Sri Lankan kids do. I picked it up quite fast, which is more than I could say for the other national language of Sri Lanka, Tamil, which I never was any good at.
In my day-to-day, since we live in an English-speaking country, I mostly speak English. With my wife, at home, I speak in Sinhala generally, but we do switch between Sinhala and English every now and then. When we call our parents, we speak in Sinhala.
I can’t remember when the switch happened, but somewhere along the way, I switched my “thinking language” from Sinhala to English. This may be difficult to understand for people who don’t have an internal monologue—yes, they exist—but every single thought I have, every day, comes to me in English, unless I make a specific effort to think in Sinhala. My internal monologue is really quite eloquent, too, much more than I could ever hope to be in real life, but that’s a topic for another day.
There must be some science behind this. A cursory Google (or DuckDuckGo, in my case) search brings up so many entries on this subject, but it’s difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff. This Reddit thread was of some interest to me, where several multilingual people had shared their experience. I have no interest in laying down any theories in this post; I simply wish to pose the question for anyone reading who speaks more than one language. What language do you think in?
