Do multilingual people think in different languages all the time?
I suppose not all people think the same way. I’m not multi-lingual; English is my only language. But I don’t think primarily in English. English is a tool for communicating with others, and not for internal thought processes, which are usually more complex and more directly representative of that of which I am thinking than any combinations of English words I could put together to try to describe them. For example, if I am thinking of putting on my shoes, I do not think of a string of words such as I will pick up my shoes, put them on my feet, and tie the laces. I think of the actions themselves, not of words to describe the actions. Language isn’t really relevant to my thoughts until I think of communicating them to others. I suppose that if I were multi-lingual, then what language I would think in, when I thought in a language, would be determined by what of my available languages I believed would be most readily understood by the person to whom I was thinking of communicating. If I’
As a multi-lingual person myself, I can tell you that I indeed think in different languages, depending upon context. Usually I think in my mother tongue, but especially when thinking about interactions with native speakers of another language (planning what I’m going to say, or thinking over a conversation from the past,) my subconscious dialogue occurs in the language of that other speaker. For example, I’m thinking about this question in English, because that’s the language we’re using, bimkom Ivrit, l’mashal (instead of Hebrew, for example. 🙂 Also, when thinking about subjects which I’ve learned in my second (or third) language, I often think about them in the language in which I learned that subject, even though I can discuss the topic in my other languages. More interestingly, as people learn new languages one of the better signs that the language is becoming internalized is when they start dreaming in the new language. As I learn a new language I look forward to those dreams in
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