Three languages, one argument

I grew up moving between three languages. English at school, French because this is Canada and because I sat an exam for it at fifteen, Arabic at home. I did not choose any of them, and for a long time I assumed the only consequence was practical. You can read more things. You can talk to more people.

The actual consequence took years to notice, and it is this: I find it very hard to believe that a disagreement is about what the people in it say it is about.

The same thing, twice

If you hold three vocabularies for one concept, you get shown constantly that the concept and the word are not the same object. Every language cuts the world at slightly different joints. There are things Arabic says in one word that English needs a clause for, and the reverse, and French has a register of formality that English has mostly given up on and that changes what a sentence means without changing what it says.

Once you have felt that a few thousand times, you stop trusting the surface of a sentence. Somebody says a thing, and the first question is not “do I agree” but “what is the thing under this”.

I did not set out to acquire that. It is just what happens when the same idea arrives at you wearing three coats.

Where it earns its keep

Almost every serious disagreement I have watched at work was two people defending the same position in different vocabulary, and neither of them could see it because each was listening for their own words and not hearing them.

A finance person and an engineer arguing about whether something is “done”. They mean different things by done. One means the work is complete, the other means it is complete and verified and cannot silently come undone. They are not in conflict. They have not yet noticed they are answering different questions.

A client and a delivery team arguing about scope. Usually the client is not asking for more, they are asking for certainty, and more is the only currency anyone has offered them. Give them the certainty and the request evaporates.

None of that is a language skill in the ordinary sense. It is a habit of suspicion about words, and multilingualism happens to be a very efficient way to acquire it, because you are wrong about a word roughly every day for about twenty years.

The part I got wrong for a long time

I used to think this made me a good mediator. It does not, necessarily. There is a failure mode where you become so interested in the translation problem that you stop believing anyone genuinely disagrees, and that is naive. Some disagreements are real. Two people can understand each other completely and want incompatible things, and the multilingual instinct will keep hunting for a misunderstanding that is not there, wasting everybody’s time being generous.

Learning to tell those apart is a separate skill and I am still not reliably good at it. The tell, when I catch it, is that a genuine conflict gets sharper when you restate both positions clearly, and a vocabulary problem dissolves. Restate it. If it dissolves, it was words. If it sharpens, stop translating and start deciding.

And the smaller thing

There is also a purely private version of this that has nothing to do with work. Thinking in more than one language means you are never quite fully inside any of them. There is always a small gap between you and the sentence.

I used to find that isolating. Now I think it is the most useful thing I have. It is very difficult to be swept along by a phrase when part of you is standing half a step outside it, checking whether it means anything. A lot of confident language does not survive that check, in three languages or in one.