Bilingualism has recently become a major issue and a valuable one because in comparison with monolingualism it allows people to live between two worlds, two cultures, adopting the specific ways of thinking and feeling of the people they come into contact. Nowadays, “bilingualism is central to most people’s lives” (Wierzbicka, “Bilingual Lives, Bilingual Experiences”) because of the large number of people who are eager to encounter something different, and are predisposed to “live in two different emotional worlds” (Wierzbicka). In the article “Bilingual Lives, Bilingual Experiences”, Anna Wierzbicka, drawing on her own experience as a bilingual, living as she says “suspended between two worlds”, shows what the real significance of being bilingual …show more content…
People tend to have a closer relationship with their first language, but most of the times they are likely not no notice it till a new language is involved. Each language brings its own “emotional world”, but for Wierzbicka, “one of them is, and the other is not, conceptualised via the category of ‘emotions’”. Wierzbicka sustains that the first language is, “the language of emotional closeness and intimacy”, while “the use of the second language can sometimes convey ‘anger’ and other ‘bad feelings’ better than anything said in one’s first language” (“Bilingual Lives, Bilingual Experiences”). With regard to this declaration, I have to say that I totally agree with Anna Wierzbicka because every time I have to speak a foreign language, I feel that there is a valuable distinction between what I am trying to say and how I am eventually understood, and I end up feeling embarrassed of my own words. However, sometimes I believe that I should not be so concerned about how I am understood when I speak a different language because as Wierzbicka asserts, “language is not a toll for expressing a person’s feelings” instead, “our very feelings depend on our language” (“Bilingual Lives, Bilingual Experiences”). Therefore, I believe that people should remain the owners of their native language, and not combine two different languages if they do not know how to juggle fairly with both, because every language has its own reputation and unknown history which deserves to be preserved and