☀️The self that shifts
Think about the last time you said "I love you" in your mother tongue. Now think about whether it would feel the same in another language.
For most multilinguals, it wouldn't. Your mother tongue carries the full emotional freight of everything you've felt since childhood. A second language offers something different: a kind of distance that, depending on the moment, can feel like loss or like freedom.
Language doesn't just describe who we are, but it actively participates in constructing us. The words available to you shape what you can notice, feel, and remember. Switch languages, and you shift, slightly, into someone else. Lose a language entirely, and an entire way of being human disappears with it.
There are roughly 7,000 languages spoken in the world today. One disappears approximately every two weeks. Each one is a cognitive universe, a complete system for understanding time, nature, relationships, and the self, that cannot be fully translated into any other.
This edition explores what language actually does to us: from the personality shifts that come with code-switching, to the 1,000-year evolution of English into something unrecognizable, to the words that exist in other tongues for experiences we've always had but couldn't name.
📖 3 Articles to Spark Your Curiosity
Speaking a Different Language Can Change How You Act and Feel
In a survey of over 1,000 multilinguals, 65% reported feeling like a different person depending on which language they were using. A personal and research-backed look at why the language you're speaking might be unlocking, or suppressing, an entire version of yourself.
→ Read on Psyche
How Language Shapes Story and How We Think
When a language dies, it doesn't just lose words. It loses cosmologies, ways of navigating land and weather, and entire relationships between people and the natural world. A look at what's really at stake as languages disappear around us.
→ Read on Substack
How Far Back in Time Can You Understand English?
A single blog post written in every form of English from 2000 AD back to 1000 AD. An experiment in how far you can follow the language before it becomes completely unrecognizable, and what that says about how radically a language can transform.
→ Read on Dead Language Society
🗞️ 3 Headlines Worth Exploring
Your Personality Changes When You Speak Another Language, But That's Not Always a Bad Thing
Research confirms that your mother tongue carries more emotional intensity, while a second language offers useful distance. A look at what this means for how we remember, connect, and learn, and what teachers can do about it.
→ Read on The Conversation
Most Endangered Languages to Save from Extinction
A data-driven report on which languages are most at risk and where. Australia alone has 133 critically endangered languages. A look at the scale of what's quietly disappearing, and some of the communities pushing back.
→ Read on Preply
Best Language Learning Apps
A practical, tested ranking of the best tools available right now to start learning a new language, compared by method, depth, and what actually works for different kinds of learners.
→ Read on NYT Wirecutter
☀️ 3 Actions to Step Out of Your Comfort Zone
Notice your own code-switching
Even without a second language, we all shift registers. Pay attention this week to how you speak differently at work, with family, with old friends. Notice what changes: the vocabulary, the tone, the things you say and don't say. Each version of you is real. The question is which contexts bring out which parts.
Learn one untranslatable word and find a moment to use it
The Lingvist list has dozens of words for experiences you've had but couldn't name. Pick one, look for the right moment to apply it this week, and notice what it feels like to finally have the word for something you've always felt.
Look up whether a language near you is endangered
The Ethnologue and the Endangered Languages Project both have searchable maps. Just becoming aware of which languages exist in your area, and which ones are quietly disappearing, is a meaningful first step toward giving them more than silence.
⚡ 6 Quick Resources
🎥 To watch: How Language Shapes the Way We Think
One cognitive scientist, 7,000 languages, and a compelling case that the words available to you shape what you can perceive in the first place.
→ Watch on YouTube
📖 To know: English Words You'll Find in Other Languages, and Their Unexpected Meanings
When languages borrow words, meanings drift in surprising directions. "Smoking" means tuxedo across half of Europe, and "camping" in French refers to the campsite, not the activity.
→ Read on Duolingo Blog
🔍 To check: Untranslatable Words from Around the World
A collection of words from languages across the world for experiences that English simply doesn't have a name for. Some of them will feel immediately, personally familiar.
→ Explore on Lingvist
💡 To explore: 5 Fun and Fascinating Facts About Language
Five quick, surprising things about how language works, including the fact that there is no such thing as a primitive language.
→ Read on Beelinguapp
🧠 To keep in mind: How Stereotypes Shape the Language People Use
The words people reach for are shaped by the assumptions they carry, often without realizing it. A look at how language and bias quietly reinforce each other.
→ Read on TIME
🎮 To play: Woolaroo
A Google Arts & Culture experiment where you photograph objects around you and discover what they're called in endangered languages. Turns out "cat" looks very different in Igbo.
→ Play on Google Arts & Culture
🎲 This week’s wonderfully random corner of the internet
🗺️ Ethnologue: How Many Languages Are Endangered?
A searchable, data-rich resource mapping the world's endangered languages. A simple and quietly sobering way to see just how much linguistic diversity is at risk, and where.
→ Explore on Ethnologue
📝 Word of the Week
Kotodama (Japanese) - The belief that words carry spiritual power; that language doesn't merely describe reality but participates in creating it. In Japanese tradition, speaking carefully is an act of respect for the force that words hold.
The whole edition rests on this idea. From the personality that shifts when you switch languages, to the cognitive universes lost when one disappears, kotodama is the oldest version of the argument that words are never neutral. They carry weight, shape perception, and bring things into being. Every language that falls silent takes its kotodama with it.
🧘♀️ Question of the Week for Introspection
Is there a feeling, an experience, or a part of yourself that you've only ever been able to express in one particular language or register? And if you've never found the right words for it at all, what would it change to finally have them?
See you next Sunday! Until then, keep your eyes open, your questions big, and your sense of wonder alive.
Your curious internet friend,
Ruxandra
