So this weekend I had the excellent experience of 4 of my friends from my study abroad semester come visit California, and I was able to meet up with them for two days in San Francisco and theoretically act like a tour guide. It was quite a fun experience, since in addition to them I was able to meet up with two high school friends, a college friend, and another (American) girl from my study abroad program. This meant that I was around many different people whose native language differed, which led me over the course of the trip to think more about languages.
As most of you know (but I've never stated on the blog, I think) I'm pretty fully conversationally fluent in German, and mostly fluent in most other respects (I feel mostly safe saying this). Thus, while in Austria, I spoke only German with my German and Austrian friends, and so it feels very natural to default to that language when I speak with them. While I was abroad, this obviously made a lot of sense and felt pretty natural at the time.
With that said, I shall attempt to examine several situations. Bold font indicates native tongue.
Example 1: English/German speaking to English/Spanish
Naturally, since this pair speaks the same native language, they'll speak in that. No problem.
Example 2: German/English speaking to French/English
Again, since they only share one language, they'll speak in English. Likewise no problem.
Example 3: German/English speaking to English/German
This is where it starts to get tricky. In some cases, like mine, the answer is obvious: I wanted to work on my German, so we spoke German. In other cases, perhaps it can be determined by location: if you're in Germany, you might try to speak German to fit it, or you might choose to speak in English so passersby have a harder time understanding you. If nothing else, it's nice to have options.
Example 4: English/German speaking to German/English & English/Spanish
Theoretically this one is simple: three people with only one language in common, you'll speak that language, right?
...right?
However, I found out that sometimes logic doesn't trump natural instinct. I had 6 months of speaking to my Austrian friends in only German, and when it came to being in America, it felt... odd... to speak in English. It similarly seemed really weird when I heard them speaking English to me, and overall it just felt really odd despite not being any logical reason why it should. This was fine in situations like Example 3, where it was just me and them; however, when a non-German speaking person was added a lá Example 4, this became weird since I had to really focus to speak English, and fight the odd urge that I was doing something wrong.
I just found this experience to be puzzling, since as Example 3 indicates, there's not reason why one language should be preferable over the other. However, I know it wasn't just me; the Austrians were also feeling very odd to be speaking to me in English as opposed to the German they were used to. It made me wonder if there's some psychological reason where you're set to speak a certain language to someone; again, it makes sense for situations like Example 1, but not so much for Example 3. I wonder if I had spent my time in Austria speaking half German and half English if that feeling would persist, or if it would have been difficult to be switching languages like that.
Anyway, I don't have any grand statements to make, but whenever I really sit down and think about the concept of "language" I find it incredibly fascinating, and this seems another facet of it.
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