Let me tell you something about synesthesia and multilingualism
I love languages. I've always loved reading. I love creating new experiences through words alone. Words fascinate me – how a collection of sounds can trigger an idea and how multiple ideas can together trigger an emotional response – just wow.
Learning a new language at the age of eight was annoying to me. We had moved. I suddenly needed to learn something that was the native tongue of other kids around me. And hearing about concepts I knew about in different combinations of sounds? Ugh! It grated. It was wrong.
Since I was required to learn them, thanks to education, I did learn them. Since I love poetry and we were assigned some poems in class, that made the job easier.
Suddenly I could feel what the native speakers felt. Even their language had a feeling, a love, an energy, that was very different from my experience but was an experience nevertheless.
I learned how to feel in their language. I learned how their language coloured the world. I learned their connotations of good and evil. I learned how, for them, a butterfly wasn't majestic at all, but a small fluttering thing. However, in their language, the sky was so much wider and bluer! Their stars twinkled so much more. Their lions were more ruthless. Their walls were more forbidding. The way they expressed love was so different from how I would have in my language – they had words for friendly platonic love that I had never even conceptualised. They had words for respect that clipped right onto pronouns and verbs.
They didn't have pretty words for trees. Trees were commonplace to them. But they had such admiration for rain and dewdrops.
That's what synesthetic experience does to a language. Words always have colour and emotion because every sound has colour and emotion. When a baby begins to speak, the sounds that sound like ma and mom feel safe, so that's how we tend to feel about the sound M. The scary sounds could be the sounds an angry person makes or a vicious animal – maybe Woo or Aaa or Grr. There's always something.
And learning a new language is like stepping into a world of completely different colour scheme! It can be daunting and jarring and even painful at first. I can tell you I haaated a couple of new words I learnt in the beginning. But when you find a few words that you truly like because they fit so much better than in my language? Wow. Really, that's where it starts to take over your perception. That's when you become obsessed with learning more, reading more of their poetry, feeling more of the experiences unknown to you so far.
In fact, I'm spending a lot of time in lockdown just learning to understand a fourth new language! It's very neat.
I only recently learned what synesthesia is. But I have always had this relationship with words. I have always been able to feel them in my soul. I have always known that L is cool, light blue, slippery, that any word with the letter L is automatically alluring, reflective, floating... I have always felt that SH is a warning, that it needs to be seen. It has done you a favour and you have wronged it, and it will only accept your apology if you are very sincere about it. I have always felt that P is bright, nearly red, and enthusiastic and will try to get you to make rash decisions. I have felt these emotions without knowing why I feel them, but knowing that they hold true in my heart.
I am not sure if my experience around language is specifically heightened by synesthesia or if all multilingual people have some sense of this feeling. All I know is,
