Analysis Of Anna Wierzbicka's Blingual Lives, Bilingual Experiences

In the contemporary globalized society, the phenomenon called bilingualism is an ordinary, but at the same time a central part of many people. According to an English dictionary, a bilingual is someone who has the ‘ ability to speak two languages with the facility of a native speaker ’, and bilingualism represents ‘the habitual use of at least two languages by an individual ’(ASHA, 2004). But what is also central for people are the emotions. The whole life of a person is built around them, they allow us to survive, but simultaneously to discover ourselves and the world around us. In Anna Wierzbicka`s preface: “ Bilingual Lives, Bilingual Experiences”, she presents the effects of a life straddling two or more linguistic spheres on the

No matter how better do we know the grammar or the vocabulary of a second language, it will always exist the influence of the first one. “ speaking English, we make automatic judgements about relationships between events (tense and aspect) and the status of particular entities (articles), while speaking, for example, Russian, we can disregard this status (Russian has no articles) but have to attend to numerous aspects of motion (Russian has a complex system of motion verbs that makes distinctions that are absent in English).

For example, Maya Salloum exemplifies it: “ Dino is a Nicaraguan in his mid-thirties who lived in Nicaragua until he was 12 years old then had to immigrate to Canada with his father and brother. (…) When Dino is happy, he laughs more loudly in Spanish and experiences the rich sounds he can playfully use, while in English he just smiles a lot. (…) Dino notices a difference in his emotional expressions in Spanish and English (Marian & Kaushankaya, 2008) to the extent of each language serving a certain function, with Spanish being the emotional language and English the rational language. “ Or, as François Grosjean wrote in Emotions in More than One Language. “ a Portuguese-English bilingual who acquired English at age fourteen said that if something makes him angry and he allows his anger to come out, there is no doubt that he will use Portuguese to express himself. And it makes sense that bilinguals who have lived in the same place all their lives, who use their first language with family and friends and their other language(s) mainly at work, will express affect in their first language.” It has often been noted that anger expressed in one’s first language may be felt more real, more intense, than that expressed in one’s second language. My own experience is