In the audio lectures “the language and the mind” by Spencer Kelly, I learned how speaking more than one language can enhance cognitive control, which results from the continuous need to block the native language almost every time the speaker wants to use another language. I haven’t found the time yet to read more and to write about the cognitive control and its other applications, but what astonished me in my last visit to Turkiye is another thing that I had previously experienced and what might be related to this phenomenon, it’s the difficulty to switch from Turkish to some other languages in a very interesting way.
I started learning Turkish in 2009, but I didn’t succeed that year, it was more of vocabulary learning, but a year later and with the help of multiple Turk Arabic learners, I was able to learn Turkish, and those learners have become later my friends, a group of multiple interests and age groups, with one of them I was able to create a very basic Turkish learning material on YouTube. However, due to the strange nature of the Turkish language to my mind which has Arabic as a native language and English as a second one, the Turkish language remained very difficult to use in multiple aspects, for example, reading a news article wasn’t a difficult thing to do, but the process of tracing the verb at the end of the sentence was engaging puzzle-solving skills rather than some conversational skills in the brain, some sentences even make me laugh when I finish reading them as they don’t seem logical at all. In the same way, some conversations are also very tough, but people mostly use very short sentences and simple repeated terms. But for my brain, is that the only difference in Turkish? I am not sure.
In one of the times when I was returning from Turkiye to Kurdistan by bus, we stopped in Zakho on the Iraqi side of the borders to have lunch, my Kurdish was in its primary stage of learning, and while I wanted to order a soup, the sentence came out in Turkish, not in Kurdish.
With Kurdish again, while I was in the queue to receive the salary in my working place in Erbil, I was making a call in Turkish or reading an article (can’t remember exactly), again as soon as I received some paper from the employee, the thank word came out in Turkish. I felt embarrassed, and I don’t know what did the employee say at that time. By that time, I was using Sorani Kurdish on a daily basis as a language of work. But that kind of switching can’t happen with any other language, especially the other languages that I speak better than Turkish.
This time it was different, I am visiting Turkiye after at least 5 years of not practicing Turkish in continuous dialogues. Even watching or reading news in Turkish was very limited. In the last two weeks before traveling, I watched two Turkish movies and I continuously read 35 pages from the book “my name is red” of some chapters that I’d previously read in Arabic. Also, I tried a new statistical method for the first time, in which I prepared lists of my most used words, bigrams, and trigrams that I extracted from my WhatsApp chats, the surprise in this method though was that I was already able to translate my most used phrases and words to Turkish as if they were already in my mind without the need to use a dictionary for most of them. Then, after conversations with Taxi drivers, and hotel employees and while returning to reading the book, I suddenly decided to make a virtual conversation in Spanish, something I do often with all the languages all the time, but my thinking in Spanish was completely blocked! Turkish blocks Spanish. My last conversation in Spanish was 5 days before my travel to Turkiye, it was more than two hours of Spanish-only conversation with two Spanish friends, so my Spanish is for sure way better than my Turkish.
This was not the first time I discover that, I had always found it funny when it requires me multiple seconds to be able to count from one to ten in Spanish after I do the same thing in Turkish, and sometimes Turkish numbers replace the Spanish ones while counting. I tried to do the same with Hebrew, but it works perfectly and never gets blocked by Turkish as if it’s located in the same area in the brain as Arabic (actually I do treat Hebrew as a variety of Arabic in my mind).
The first time I discovered that was in 2017-2018 when I was using both Turkish and Spanish on a daily basis with two colleagues, Napoleon (from Nicaragua) was always laughing when I can’t switch back to Spanish after I speak with my Turkmen colleague in Turkish, or when it takes me some time to be able to switch or to have some Turkish words in the middle of the Spanish sentences.
Spanish in my mind is close to English, but not very close to it. It’s the most damaged language by the Turkish blockade, the Kurdish comes next, and they are the 4th and the 5th languages for me in terms of the sequence of learning languages. Both of them are newer than Turkish and they are new to me too despite that both of them are practiced way more than Turkish. In terms of the emotional usage of the language – which is something to be considered for retaining and remembering languages after brain injuries – I don’t think that any of these languages have an advantage over the other two, all of them were languages to talk with friends, Turkish could have some warmer moments than Kurdish and Spanish, but still, not in a sense that I had any intimate moments while speaking Turkish.
What happened with Turkish during these days, although I didn’t have many conversations (for example one day I can remember 7 conversations with 10 minutes for the longest one), I was thinking in Turkish all the time, making virtual dialogues. When I don’t have sufficient confidence, and I need vocabulary that I may not have by the time I need it, I keep making all the possible dialogues before I need them, in most cases, I don’t need them. The last experiment I did, is again, trying to open another virtual conversation in Spanish, trying to tell Napoleon about something (virtually in my mind), but the amazing thing was that Turkish phrases were jumping exactly with the same meaning as the phrases that I wanted to start talking with, two-words or three-words phrases were simply replaced by the Turkish equivalent.
Sometimes I faced some Kurmanji Kurds, and generally, they try to switch to their language as we are supposed to be one people of Kurmanji and Sorani Kurds (of course we are, if we are comparing that with the historical/cultural links with Turko-Byzantine mixture that’s called Turkiye today). Such conversations usually end up switching to Turkish, especially if the topic was more complex or if the sense of recognizing and matching patterns in words was weak on the other Kurmanji side (they are usually very less exposed to Soranis), but here comes the blocking effect of the Turkish again, represented by a delay in the ability to switch to Sorani and the Turkish words that suddenly appear instead of the Turkish ones. Compared with Arabic, I translate to my wife in Arabic all the time and at a very high speed without a single Turkish word to get inside the flow by mistake. On one of these times when a Turkish phrase appeared in the middle of the sentence, I just stopped and laughed. The Kurmanji shop owner didn’t understand what happened, and neither did I.
Can that happen with another language? It’s impossible that Arabic intersects the English area in the brain or intervenes the English flow of words in any noticeable way, maybe I need slightly longer time to switch to English, i.e. to start saying something in English and maybe the same happens with Kurdish, but not in the same way as it happens with Turkish. In Farsi, which I didn’t mention here for lacking the real experience of conversation in it, the time of learning Kurdish, after I learned Farsi, was full of jumping words between the two languages, but there was no blocking effect. They are just residing in the same area in my mind. Although some strange thing happened recently when I spent 20 minutes or so having conversations with Iranians in the airport, the Hebrew yes “kan” was replacing the Farsi “Bale”, taking into consideration that Hebrew is the language that I am learning now.
Did Arabic have the same blocking effect on any language? Did English, do it? Despite the blocking feature of the native language, which must have happened to me at some time or must be still happening, it’s not something that I was able to notice and record, or maybe the phenomenon is a completely separate one.
Two weeks after returning from Turkiye, as I used in the office while working, I was listening to songs, Turkish songs this time. It was the last day for Javier before he returns back to Spain, leaving the UK, I wanted to ask him while I was listening to Burcu Gunes, when will you leave today? My brain automatically produced “Ne zaman gideceksin bugun?”.