Bilingual Experience Summary

Anna Wierzbicka is a Polish linguist with many articles published along her career. She is working at the Australian National University in Canberra where she spent much time writing over 20 books famous in his field , her work containing studies about semantics, pragmatics and cross-cultural linguistics.
Her article Bilingual lives,Bilingual experience is a preface of the book Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development . In this article the author addresses several topics about bilingual life based on research done by other people but she also provides examples from her personal life .
She says that emotions are transmitted differently from one language to another and also the stylistic registers are also completely different

It happens often that a speaker of two languages to have some hand gestures when speaking a language and other gestures when speaking in a second language. All of these are issues absolutely normal because like I said above language influences the individual to the level of sensory and behavioral. Let’s take for example the experience of Christoph Harbsmeier a multilingual German Sinologue who says in an interview in the French magazine Epok that “‘the influence of language on thought, how we are influenced ... in our ways of being and of feeling by our

The more a person knows many categories of concepts specific to each nation, the more it explores larger concepts, emotions, and feelings in the world. The author of the article gives an personal example from her life as a bilingual person : “For example, as I have discussed in a recent focused on the concept of ‘grief’ (Wierzbicka, 2003), Polish has no word for ‘grief’, whereas English has no word for the important Polish concept of ‘nieszcze˛s´cie’, roughly ‘disaster-cum-unhappiness’ (in Russian, nescˇast’e, in French malheur). This means that the same event, for example the death of a loved person, can be interpreted by a speaker of Polish through the conceptual category of ‘nieszcze˛s´cie’ and by the speaker of English through the conceptual category of ‘grief’. This means that the emotional lives of speakers of different languages (in this case English and Polish) are likely to be different, to some extent. “ . Because of the cultural differences, between the languages creates a shield which prevents people to use a word that covers a concept in both languages. Also the speaker needs to comply on one’s language stylistic register. One can’t express a meaning of a word that means something in one language or has a stronger impact in particularly by trying to translate in another language which doesn’t have the same stylistic register as the first language