Poems and writings

Multilingualism in plural communities

A few days ago I made this post asking the plural community about the languages used internally with each other, in order to make some kind of study about it, or at least a comment on it. I gotta say, the results surprised me quite a bit!

For those who don't know, I'm basically trilingual, I have one mother language (Spanish), the place where I live has another official language (I won't say which one it is because, yknow, I like not being doxxed), and I learned English when I was really young, slowly learning it through lots and lots of practice. Two years ago I got my C2 degree in English, which means I basically have native level on it.

In my own experience, it's interesting how languages in our system work. For fictives in the system, for example, they seem to speak exclusively in English (at least internally), because when we watched their source, it was in English. However, they don't have a problem when speaking Spanish externally, because we've been speaking it since we were born. I don't know exactly how it works, but yeah that's what we found.

The other language where I'm from, for us it's used mostly exclusively in academic context or formal context, so we don't use it that often. Usually, if someone speaks to us in that language, we use it out of respect for the other person, but we don't use it in our day-to-day life. Because of this, however, fictives have a lot of trouble with this language. They can mimic it well enough (masking goes brrr), and they can use it, but it doesn't come naturally to them because they didn't technically learn it, they just base their use in our own memories to use it, I guess?

In the poll we made a few weeks ago, it seems as if, out of 174 votes, a 25.3% of systems report to use their original/native language for internal communication, 16.7% use the foreign language (I'm guessing, in most cases, this one is English?), and a whooping 44.8% of systems use a mix of the two languages, like we do.

Some users reported that they had some headmates who couldn't talk at all so they used ASL with them, which counts as another language, some systems defaulted to English as it was the "easier" one, some systems used only the non-English language under specific circumstances, some they use a mix of languages depending on the headmate, some use only one language depending on the context, some only internally used their own fictional language, some systems use the most convenient one in the moment, or the easier one to talk with. There were even a couple of systems who even used their own made up language to communicate with each other, which is so cool? Or even use a language the core/host doesn't talk with?

I guess the conclusion to this little study is: It depends on the system and, most importantly, it depends on the headmate. Some are more comfortable with the language that is most well-known inside the system, or the one they use the most externally with other people. When using languages, mostly the used ones were: Spanish, Mandarin, ASL, Amalgam, Italian, French, Polish, German, Brazilian Portuguese, Japanese, Russian, Norwegian, Na'vi, Toki Pona... Which was really, really interesting! Lots of bilingual or trilingual systems out there!

I wish I had time to expand a little bit more onto this, but for now, just wanna say, thank you so much to every one who reblogged my original post for reach. Without it I wouldn't have been able to get so much data! And thank you so much to the participants of the original poll, your answers were fascinating!