Do other multilingual people also struggle with interjections or onomatopoeia differing vastly between their native language and, for example, English?
I always have to catch myself when I have been writing in English and went “uh-huh” but particularly “uuuh” and “oooh” because in my native language (German) what is the English “ooooh” is “uuuh” and is also pronounced as such. So it’s a bit of a hang up to switch between English “uuuuh, yeah, so that happened” and German “uuuh, [that’s fancy]”
Another thing that has confused people before is German “Eh”/ “Äh” and “ey” because the German equivalent of English “eeeh, so that happened” would be “Äh, ja, [so that happened] and “ey” is a German interjection I can’t put my finger on right now, mostly to catch someone’s attention like English “hey” or for emphasis. But it’s these little words also, “Öh” being a German variant for things like “uuuh, what?”
And of course the beloved “Hä?” which is “huh?” but feels different like “huh” is “what is going on?/ is that so?” and “Hä?” is “the fuck are you talkin’ about?” (Especially with German grannies insisting “Das heißt nicht „hä?“, das heißt „wie bitte?““)
And while I’m at it, I want to say I miss “doch” because of its versatility.
I can’t even say in which capacity this impacts my third and fourth(ish) language because I’m still a beginner and don’t really chat in those but this massive dissonance catches me often because essentially 90% of my online life is in English and currently 80-90% of my WhatsApp conversations are in German (though my cousin, my best friend, and I use so many English loan words or just have the English words at-the-ready quicker than the German words it’s not even funny)
