Emotional Intensity of Languages in Bilinguals
Various studies have found that for bilinguals, the emotional intensity of L1 is different from the emotional intensity of subsequent languages learned. These studies concluded that L1 has the highest emotional impact and is the language of personal involvement while L2 is the language that can create distance and detachment as it has lesser emotional impact as compared to L1.
Yet, paradoxically, many late bilinguals indicate that it is harder for them to swear in their L1 as compared to their L2. As such they would prefer to use their L2 to swear despite it having lesser emotional impact on the speakers themselves. This could be due to the fact that they are unable to feel the total strength of their spoken words when swearing in their L2 and as such, they would swear in their L2 more easily.
Read more about this topic: Sequential Bilingualism
Famous quotes containing the words emotional, intensity and/or languages:
“Most people agree that men have trouble showing hurt, jealousy, and fear but even mothers, whose wider emotional range is often taken for granted, also seem more comfortable with anger than these other “unparentlike” feelings. This is probably because several generations of mothers have now been twelve-step-programmed and pop-psychologized enough to believe that expressing hurt, fear, anxiety, or dependence will create pathological guilt in their kids.”
—Ron Taffel (20th century)
“The bourgeois treasures nothing more highly than the self.... And so at the cost of intensity he achieves his own preservation and security. His harvest is a quiet mind which he prefers to being possessed by God, as he prefers comfort to pleasure, convenience to liberty, and a pleasant temperature to that deathly inner consuming fire.”
—Hermann Hesse (1877–1962)
“No doubt, to a man of sense, travel offers advantages. As many languages as he has, as many friends, as many arts and trades, so many times is he a man. A foreign country is a point of comparison, wherefrom to judge his own.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)