How Does One Brain Speak Two Languages?
I used to think bilingual people had some kind of secret internal switchboard operator living inside their heads. One language came in, another language went out, and somewhere in the middle a tiny overworked employee wearing a headset was frantically connecting calls. "Hello, yes, this sentence would like to become Spanish." "Please hold." That seemed reasonable to me because, frankly, the alternative sounded impossible. How does one brain manage two languages at the same time without bursting into flames? After all, my brain can barely remember why I walked into a room. Yet somehow millions of people casually navigate multiple languages every day. They order coffee in one language, argue with relatives in another, dream in a third, and switch between them faster than I can switch streaming services after realizing the movie I picked is terrible. The more I learned about bilingualism, the stranger it became. Because the brain isn't storing two separate di...
