The Language I Don’t Quite Feel

Photo by Joanna Stołowicz on Unsplash

On emotional distance, bilingualism, and why English works better for me at work than at home

Ten years. That’s how long it’s been since I moved to New York and started speaking English on the regular. Somewhere along the way, the language seems to have made me more direct — sometimes too direct — at work, and occasionally to my husband’s frustration, a little emotionally distant at home.

It may also be why my therapist sometimes asks which part of my body was affected by an emotionally intense encounter. Or maybe that’s just plain old me intellectualizing my feelings and my second language is a convenient excuse.

Either way, that’s what English seems to do to you when you come from my side of the world and speak Turkish, a language with plenty of dark corners where meaning hides in tone, gesture, and what goes unsaid.

Where I’m from, there’s a greater chance someone will say something they don’t quite mean, such as “I’m so happy for you”, which can mean I deserved it, not you. “Congratulations on getting married!” with a subtle side eye can mean Did you know they lived together before marriage? How shameful. And “The food was delicious” can mean I wouldn’t give it to a stray dog.

Meaning lives in the words, the tone, the gesture, which is one reason I appreciate the American tendency to say what you mean and mean what you say. Except, of course, when they’re lying.

And where I’m from, “home” is “ev” or “yuva”, “love” is “aşk” or “sevgi”, and “hate” is “nefret”. Every time I think of something I don’t like, it can easily become something I hate, because I am not sure how many points a slow walker or car honking scores on the not like/hate graph. I just don’t really feel the words. It’s kind of a superpower.

That superpower has its uses. Learning English in fourth grade and not using it outside the class, I had very little emotional stake in it, and I’ve seen this become an advantage in articulating my thoughts about something at work. It became almost a game: seeing how many words I can trim until I get to the meat of the meeting minutes.

It’s only when I get home, all smug with the leftover sense of accomplishment from work, thinking I was assertive, direct and clear, that a caveman sentence spills out of my mouth to my husband after seeing our messy apartment. “You no did anything today. Me angry.”

The thing with being bilingual is that you get a small advantage when apologizing afterward. “I’m sorry, I got a little too direct. English is not my first language.” The problem — or perhaps the privilege — is how little I have at stake in the emotional landscape of English. I know where the words are. I know what they mean. I can move through them efficiently. But sometimes I feel as though I’m standing outside the landscape, looking in.

Of course, I can always fall back on good old Turkish subtlety. I can ask, “Should I bring more food?” when what I mean is You finished almost all of it. Or, “What did you do today?” when what I mean is Why didn’t you put away the dishes?

But then something terrible happens: people take me literally. They say yes to more food. My husband starts telling me about his day — and, annoyingly, it turns out he actually did a lot. And my point? Lost somewhere in the English landscape.

There’s a name for some of this: the foreign language effect. You probably didn’t learn your native tongue in a classroom, following a textbook, or when a teacher turned to you and asked what armut means in English. (It’s pear.) You learned it while crying “Mommy,” somewhere among your earliest memories of falling down or peeing in your diaper. You learned the emotional weight of “I like you” when the boy you said it to turned around, laughed, and told you that you were funny. You learned “no” when your dad gave you that look after you insisted they buy a wind chime whose sound would haunt everyone’s dreams.

It wasn’t just the language you learned. It was the language playing in the background while you were building your emotional life.

Let’s come back to the pear. Pear is something I first met in a textbook: a simple sketch of a green fruit next to a vocabulary word. But armut hung from a lush tree. It ripened in the sun, fell into the grass, and waited for me to pick it up and eat it. One word came with a definition. The other came with life.

That helps explain why researchers think the native tongue often feels more emotional. You learned it through parents, arguments, affection, embarrassment, praise, punishment and play and because of that, every word comes with its own emotional flavor.

A foreign language, on the other hand, can have a milder flavor depending on when and how you learned it. The salt and acid are there; it’s just not always punchy enough. Think flash cards. Grammar exercises. A green pear on a page. Less emotional association, more emotional distance.

But you know what it’s best for? Work. A simple, digestible meal of English for your lunch break. No childhood grudges, no family hierarchy, no embarrassment behind “I disagree.” Just the words and what needs to get done. English also gives you one more gift at work: you. Your boss, your client, the intern, the seventy-year-old consultant… Everyone gets the same pronoun. No honorific gymnastics required.

Of course, after ten years of accumulating happy moments, disappointments, arguments, and excitement in English, I’m not really standing outside its landscape anymore. There are still roads I need help navigating, words I understand but don’t quite feel, but I’ve accumulated enough memories here to call it familiar. It’s the landscape I escape to after enough judging looks from an elder for not picking the armut up off the ground, or after getting tangled in the formal and informal yous of Turkish.

At work, I’m still grateful for the clean efficiency of “I disagree.” At home, though, I’m learning to take the long way.