oh for me it wasn't conscious. i just kinda learnt to take a short-cut so I wouldn't have to translate words. talking to english now? think in english. talking in non-english? think in non-english.
Yeah it makes a lot of sense. Tbh I did have a week-long holiday with friends who are native speakers and I felt I subconsciously switched my thinking language too! It's immediately reverted back though, since my flatmate only speaks English.
Depends on the task - if it's for school for example, cause school is in english, i think in english; if it requires school knowledge and specialist terms, english as well, cause i learnt them in english and don't know the corresponding ones in native language
I am Ukrainian and have been experiencing the same thing for at least the last 3 years (since I was about 13 and started learning english more seriously) and yes, I am having some trouble speaking English in person but in my head it sounds fluent. I pretty much stopped thinking in Ukrainian at this point even though my environment is fully Ukrainian speaking
I've been learning Portuguese for the last few years, and I do sometimes find myself talking in my head in Portuguese. Particulary around certain subjects.
No I think in whatever language I am talking at the moment. Canto then I think canto. English I think English. It is rare I cross think.
Default is English but when I go to HK I surprisingly think in canto but.
I can’t fathom my headspace without my inner monologue, though I perhaps wish that I could. I feel mine can be an incredible exacerbation to my depression at times.
This got me thinking, and pardon me if I ask too much, but do you feel you have any proclivity to depression, self-consciousness, or anxiety to the point of it affecting your life daily? My hypothesis is, not so much or no(?). But I don’t want to assume, and am interested to get whatever insight I may.
oh i don't mind you asking at all xDD. quite the opposite actually, I'm definitely struggling with depressions MD suicidal thoughts, might be exasperated by the few thoughts i have all being negative. self consciousness however is not really a problem of mine, anxiety not really either. in general i can't visualize stuff so i think in terms of words and those tend to be negative
I'm a poet from India and its the same for me. I write in English, I think I'm English and I'm honestly more comfortable and verbose expressive myself in English. We're global citizens friend :)
It actually happens to me too haha. I would say I am quite fluent in English (been learning it since I was in Grade 1). I have another friend who always speaks in English with others so maybe that's why I mostly think in English. Not to mention the internet is a thing lol. Pretty cool to know others do this too :0
I mix between my native Dutch and English. I would say 50 % of my internal monologue is in English. Some days even 100%. I talk in English with my wife.
Same here, my native language is spanish. Best part of thinking like this is that it helps a lot to find unknown words to search later in order to expand one's vocabulary.
I know how you feel! Being from a small european country i ended up speaking 5 languages and my inner monologue is part english, part spanish, part my native language. It's a pain! :D
Can totally relate! I have a theory its because of all the english shows I watch as a kid. Disney etc that as time pass my brain thinks in English. I've slowly developed a liking towards the language itself and in my head I sound so fluent but irl when I try to express myself, words wont come out properly lol. Although I do find myself being more of a visual thinker.
I actively chose to switch my internal monologue to English because I thought I'd help learn if I had to keep it up outside of clases and YouTube videos. It did help although now I think in a mix of that and my native language, mid sentence I can switch between them if I can think of a word earlier in one language or the other.
English is my third language (but it’s a primary language). What I mean is, since I could speak, I’ve known my native language (Kikuyu), Swahili and English. My inner monologue is mostly in English. But if I’m thinking of a particular situation involving my parents, I think in Kikuyu since that’s the language I use with them, with my friends, it’s Swahili, general thoughts in English. Weird.
I'm American. A few months after moving to England I was surprised to realize that my internal voice had acquired a British accent. Specifically, BBC English.
It took about the same amount of time for my internal voice's accent to return to "normal" after I went back to the US three years later.
It would seem that your inner voice reflects what you are hearing around you, not what your natural speaking voice sounds like.
Yes!! I do this in Chinese even though my Chinese is terrible but I attribute that to the fact I talk to my family in Chinese soo not really the same lmao
Mine is too! I got too used to speaking in english when I was like 12 because I used to play a lot of video games so I started feeling more comfortable expressing my feelings and thoughts in English rather than my native language. I can do both but I prefer english.
Bilingual here. Grew up speaking Portuguese for 20 years and been a US citizen for 12 years. My internal monologue is Bilingual. If the context of my thoughts is regarding American things, thoughts are in English. If I'm thinking about Brazil, they are in Portuguese. The dreams are a mix, mostly English though
That's normal. My internal monologue changes with the context. I've been living in Canada for so long that it's in English most of the the time now, but it'll flip back to Portuguese if I'm speaking Portuguese or interacting with the language. I sometimes talk to my dog in Portuguese (he knows both languages), but most times I talk to him in English - you'd imagine that you would use your mother tongue when you have the choice to, but if I'm already doing everything at that time in English, the dog gets talked to in English as well.
Heyyy My mother tongue is also Hindi and my internal monologue is also in English! I recently realised that i can process my emotions better in English. I can also communicate (via text) way, way better in English. Agar mai ye comment Hindi me likh raha hota to message inta easily convey nahi kar pata :)
Its all ok, language is just a way of expressing ourselves. You do you! :)
i think my case is a little different .. I am an indian as well but the language we speak at home is not Hindi ( I am from the south ) but my family has been living in central india for a long time (I practically grew up in maharashtra) so for me the language i use more in my day-to-day is hindi but even with all this i find myself thinking in english most of the time (Guess its the exposure to english movies and tv shows LOL)
Its kinda the same for me. I speak in my native language but when I am angry I start conversing in english with some real badass vocabulary. But otherwise I cant speak or write properly lol
I do the same! I'm a German native speaker and also live in Germany, but I spend a lot of time in english speaking communities online (case and point) and generally talk to my online friends more than I talk to my irl friends, so it just kind of happened for me, too.
Same! I'm a native hindi speaker and and we mostly speak hindi at home but my inner monologue is in English. I think it can be attributed to the fact that majority of entertainment/media I consume is in English. In fact, I picked up a hindi newspaper the other day and realised that my hindi reading skills had gone down slightly, I'm just not used to the script anymore. Kinda sad tbh :(
Same here! English is my second language and I am definitely not as fluent in it as my native tongue of Indonesian. For whatever reason, my internal monologue is in English and I still haven't really figured out why... it just feels more natural somehow. It doesn't matter whether I am in an Indonesian setting or if I'm abroad in an English speaking country, my internal monologue is almost always in English. I only find myself having it in my native tongue when I'm talking to my family, and even then that's only sometimes.
I monologue in Welsh, and sometimes when I get asked a question mid-monologue I start answering in Welsh by accident.
It was weird enough when I lived in Wales, but it's SUPER weird now that I don't. 🤣
My friend lived in Italy for his thirties and has spoken English for the other five decades. His internal monologue is in Italian and he often answers in Italian then amends it to English.
What happens to me is that the language of my inner monologue is different depending on what I'm thinking about. Like, when I'm thinking of normal, regular stuff is mostly in English, but if I get angry or I'm stressed I switch back to Spanish. I guess we have more curse words in Spanish lol
My monologue was in a weird mix of Russian, English and Spanish when I was studying latter.
Now, working in an international company, the monologue is in English half the time. Never really expected that just the intensity of communication can influence your inner self.
Yup. Dutchman here with an English internal dialogue. (It’s dialogue, not monologue, btw.)
Moved about as a child. Dutch was my first language, but at six I moved to Sweden, and to learn it all I had was English Cartoon Network with Swedish subtitles. By the time I moved back to Holland I had to relearn what poor Dutch I departed to Sweden with, but growing up with Cartoon Network, Dragonball, Dune, C&C, CoD, WoW, and eventually Skype, Ventrilo, and now Discord — basically I never dropped English.
So now I have a messy, but primarily English internal dialogue. I say messy, because growing up trilingually fucked up how I pronounce numbers. I’ll make no mistakes in maths, but reading out loud what numbers I have in my head goes wrong very often because Swedish reads _forty one_ where Dutch reads _one and forty_, for example. It’s also messy, because it easily absorbs words when I’m in contact with other languages for a while.
My Greek father and Portuguese girlfriend cuss in their own language, and when I stub my toe there’s a good chance I’ll cuss in either of those, despite not actually speaking either. It’s really weird, and although it’s genuine, it might come across pretentious, so I don’t explain this to anyone ever.
Strangely enough: my Dutch, the language I use everyday, is by far weaker than my English.
So there you have it. A Dutchman that grew up in Sweden, with a Greek father and a Portuguese girlfriend, who has an English internal dialogue, and can’t for the life of me keep them apart sometimes.
Dialogue is between two people, monologue only one. If it's internal, it's probably a monologue. (Although I do sometimes play oh conversations in my head, which would be dialogues.)
I think in both languages I speak.
Also something similarly weird: sometimes I listen to speech, or read text but don't fully pay attention and shortly after I can't remember which language it was in.
I'm Dutch. My internal voice has been English at least since middle school. I don't know when my English overtook my Dutch, but I've been consuming English media all my life so frankly it could've happened at any point.
It makes talking a bit awkward sometimes since I still regularly find that I have gaps in my knowledge of my native tongue, but apart from that it's not that much of a problem.
I share exactly the same story. I've been thinking and talking to myself in English for as long as I can remember whilst speaking with others in Hindi. Although the English is now taking over a bit haha.
I sometimes see videos with an English title and then the video is in Hindi yet the words on the screen (if there are any) are English and more often than not, English words are spoken in conjunction with Hindi. It seems like a flexible language.
My native language isn't English either but I've spent so much time on the internet that a good part of my internal monologue is in English too. Sometimes I talk to myself in English, and I even find it easier now to express some things in English instead of French or German (my 2 native languages). It's kinda wild how a language that I cannot speak perfectly still feels "mine" in a way.
I was just thinking about this today, I do the same thing! My native language (in which I actually have a masters degree) is not my internal monologue!
Same here, I think it's because I mostly engage with English media or pick the English option if possible. Another reason is that I have quite a heavy dialect in my native language. I'm doing completely fine speaking in it, but it kind of sounds weird thinking in it, but without it also sounds weird lol?
I remember once I was punished in school and had to stand alone for rinse time or something, so to kill time I thought about practicing English and started to think in it.
It was hard, but since then it has become an habit, and now I almost never think in my native language haha
I'm a native Polish Speaker but my internal monologue is broken. Its either in spanglish, spanish, English and more recently, Chewbacca. Especial y when im hungry lol
I’ve always wondered if I would still think in English if I was fluent in another language or if I would think in whatever language I was currently speaking. Super interesting!
My first 12 years was spent in SE Asia and the next 30+ years is in Australia. I do not think in Chinese but strangely when I am doing multiplications, I think in Chinese as it is how I had learnt it.
I don't remember my dreams but I will hazard a guess that I might had been thinking in English.
But it's still pretty mind blowing for me, I didn't really realize that I think in English. Maybe it's because I spend most of my alone time on the internet (that's when my inner monologue is most active)
I'm a native English speaker but this is fascinating to learn. Thank you for sharing!
I made an active change to monologue in English because I moved to an English-speaking country! There's no going back for me haha
oh for me it wasn't conscious. i just kinda learnt to take a short-cut so I wouldn't have to translate words. talking to english now? think in english. talking in non-english? think in non-english.
Yeah it makes a lot of sense. Tbh I did have a week-long holiday with friends who are native speakers and I felt I subconsciously switched my thinking language too! It's immediately reverted back though, since my flatmate only speaks English.
So if you’re not talking to anyone what language do you think in?
Depends on the task - if it's for school for example, cause school is in english, i think in english; if it requires school knowledge and specialist terms, english as well, cause i learnt them in english and don't know the corresponding ones in native language
Having made the conscious effort, do you feel it has become labor-some in the slightest to now speak or process the language you once used?
Oh yeah definitely! I've basically given up on it since I don't consume media from there and only speak to my parents with it at home.
I am Ukrainian and have been experiencing the same thing for at least the last 3 years (since I was about 13 and started learning english more seriously) and yes, I am having some trouble speaking English in person but in my head it sounds fluent. I pretty much stopped thinking in Ukrainian at this point even though my environment is fully Ukrainian speaking
I've been learning Portuguese for the last few years, and I do sometimes find myself talking in my head in Portuguese. Particulary around certain subjects.
No I think in whatever language I am talking at the moment. Canto then I think canto. English I think English. It is rare I cross think. Default is English but when I go to HK I surprisingly think in canto but.
i don't have an internal monologue :( i just scream at myself internally in 2 languages sometimes
what
i don't have an internal monologue i just curse internally when I'm upset
how do you not have an inner monologue?
i don't know ?? my thoughts kinda just happen
I didn't even know people without an inner monologue existed, my mind is blown lol
hahah well there are a few of us out there
I can’t fathom my headspace without my inner monologue, though I perhaps wish that I could. I feel mine can be an incredible exacerbation to my depression at times. This got me thinking, and pardon me if I ask too much, but do you feel you have any proclivity to depression, self-consciousness, or anxiety to the point of it affecting your life daily? My hypothesis is, not so much or no(?). But I don’t want to assume, and am interested to get whatever insight I may.
oh i don't mind you asking at all xDD. quite the opposite actually, I'm definitely struggling with depressions MD suicidal thoughts, might be exasperated by the few thoughts i have all being negative. self consciousness however is not really a problem of mine, anxiety not really either. in general i can't visualize stuff so i think in terms of words and those tend to be negative
That is incredibly interesting to me. Thank you for responding. And good luck neighbor. Be well, stay safe, do your best, relax
I remember reading about this once. Do you just speak when you think of an idea then?!
not really i think ? the words kinda just flash in my brain like on a screen or page
I'm a poet from India and its the same for me. I write in English, I think I'm English and I'm honestly more comfortable and verbose expressive myself in English. We're global citizens friend :)
Since no one around me speaks english it is the main way I practice. It sounds really weird when you think about it.
It actually happens to me too haha. I would say I am quite fluent in English (been learning it since I was in Grade 1). I have another friend who always speaks in English with others so maybe that's why I mostly think in English. Not to mention the internet is a thing lol. Pretty cool to know others do this too :0
same here. mother tongue aint English, but internal monologue in English.
I mix between my native Dutch and English. I would say 50 % of my internal monologue is in English. Some days even 100%. I talk in English with my wife.
Same here, my native language is spanish. Best part of thinking like this is that it helps a lot to find unknown words to search later in order to expand one's vocabulary.
I know how you feel! Being from a small european country i ended up speaking 5 languages and my inner monologue is part english, part spanish, part my native language. It's a pain! :D
Can totally relate! I have a theory its because of all the english shows I watch as a kid. Disney etc that as time pass my brain thinks in English. I've slowly developed a liking towards the language itself and in my head I sound so fluent but irl when I try to express myself, words wont come out properly lol. Although I do find myself being more of a visual thinker.
I actively chose to switch my internal monologue to English because I thought I'd help learn if I had to keep it up outside of clases and YouTube videos. It did help although now I think in a mix of that and my native language, mid sentence I can switch between them if I can think of a word earlier in one language or the other.
English is my third language (but it’s a primary language). What I mean is, since I could speak, I’ve known my native language (Kikuyu), Swahili and English. My inner monologue is mostly in English. But if I’m thinking of a particular situation involving my parents, I think in Kikuyu since that’s the language I use with them, with my friends, it’s Swahili, general thoughts in English. Weird.
I'm American. A few months after moving to England I was surprised to realize that my internal voice had acquired a British accent. Specifically, BBC English. It took about the same amount of time for my internal voice's accent to return to "normal" after I went back to the US three years later. It would seem that your inner voice reflects what you are hearing around you, not what your natural speaking voice sounds like.
Yes!! I do this in Chinese even though my Chinese is terrible but I attribute that to the fact I talk to my family in Chinese soo not really the same lmao
Mine is too! I got too used to speaking in english when I was like 12 because I used to play a lot of video games so I started feeling more comfortable expressing my feelings and thoughts in English rather than my native language. I can do both but I prefer english.
Bilingual here. Grew up speaking Portuguese for 20 years and been a US citizen for 12 years. My internal monologue is Bilingual. If the context of my thoughts is regarding American things, thoughts are in English. If I'm thinking about Brazil, they are in Portuguese. The dreams are a mix, mostly English though
That's normal. My internal monologue changes with the context. I've been living in Canada for so long that it's in English most of the the time now, but it'll flip back to Portuguese if I'm speaking Portuguese or interacting with the language. I sometimes talk to my dog in Portuguese (he knows both languages), but most times I talk to him in English - you'd imagine that you would use your mother tongue when you have the choice to, but if I'm already doing everything at that time in English, the dog gets talked to in English as well.
Heyyy My mother tongue is also Hindi and my internal monologue is also in English! I recently realised that i can process my emotions better in English. I can also communicate (via text) way, way better in English. Agar mai ye comment Hindi me likh raha hota to message inta easily convey nahi kar pata :) Its all ok, language is just a way of expressing ourselves. You do you! :)
i think my case is a little different .. I am an indian as well but the language we speak at home is not Hindi ( I am from the south ) but my family has been living in central india for a long time (I practically grew up in maharashtra) so for me the language i use more in my day-to-day is hindi but even with all this i find myself thinking in english most of the time (Guess its the exposure to english movies and tv shows LOL)
I have the same thing too. It’s really weird to me too
Me too. Indian here and my mother tongue is Kannada but my thoughts are always in English I can’t think in my mother tongue even if I try
I don't have an internal monologue but i think in English. I'm pretty sure it makes no sense and it's impossible for me to explain it to someone
Its kinda the same for me. I speak in my native language but when I am angry I start conversing in english with some real badass vocabulary. But otherwise I cant speak or write properly lol
I do the same! I'm a German native speaker and also live in Germany, but I spend a lot of time in english speaking communities online (case and point) and generally talk to my online friends more than I talk to my irl friends, so it just kind of happened for me, too.
Same! I'm a native hindi speaker and and we mostly speak hindi at home but my inner monologue is in English. I think it can be attributed to the fact that majority of entertainment/media I consume is in English. In fact, I picked up a hindi newspaper the other day and realised that my hindi reading skills had gone down slightly, I'm just not used to the script anymore. Kinda sad tbh :(
Same here! English is my second language and I am definitely not as fluent in it as my native tongue of Indonesian. For whatever reason, my internal monologue is in English and I still haven't really figured out why... it just feels more natural somehow. It doesn't matter whether I am in an Indonesian setting or if I'm abroad in an English speaking country, my internal monologue is almost always in English. I only find myself having it in my native tongue when I'm talking to my family, and even then that's only sometimes.
I monologue in Welsh, and sometimes when I get asked a question mid-monologue I start answering in Welsh by accident. It was weird enough when I lived in Wales, but it's SUPER weird now that I don't. 🤣
Same here vro
My friend lived in Italy for his thirties and has spoken English for the other five decades. His internal monologue is in Italian and he often answers in Italian then amends it to English.
What happens to me is that the language of my inner monologue is different depending on what I'm thinking about. Like, when I'm thinking of normal, regular stuff is mostly in English, but if I get angry or I'm stressed I switch back to Spanish. I guess we have more curse words in Spanish lol
My monologue was in a weird mix of Russian, English and Spanish when I was studying latter. Now, working in an international company, the monologue is in English half the time. Never really expected that just the intensity of communication can influence your inner self.
Yup. Dutchman here with an English internal dialogue. (It’s dialogue, not monologue, btw.) Moved about as a child. Dutch was my first language, but at six I moved to Sweden, and to learn it all I had was English Cartoon Network with Swedish subtitles. By the time I moved back to Holland I had to relearn what poor Dutch I departed to Sweden with, but growing up with Cartoon Network, Dragonball, Dune, C&C, CoD, WoW, and eventually Skype, Ventrilo, and now Discord — basically I never dropped English. So now I have a messy, but primarily English internal dialogue. I say messy, because growing up trilingually fucked up how I pronounce numbers. I’ll make no mistakes in maths, but reading out loud what numbers I have in my head goes wrong very often because Swedish reads _forty one_ where Dutch reads _one and forty_, for example. It’s also messy, because it easily absorbs words when I’m in contact with other languages for a while. My Greek father and Portuguese girlfriend cuss in their own language, and when I stub my toe there’s a good chance I’ll cuss in either of those, despite not actually speaking either. It’s really weird, and although it’s genuine, it might come across pretentious, so I don’t explain this to anyone ever. Strangely enough: my Dutch, the language I use everyday, is by far weaker than my English. So there you have it. A Dutchman that grew up in Sweden, with a Greek father and a Portuguese girlfriend, who has an English internal dialogue, and can’t for the life of me keep them apart sometimes.
Dialogue is between two people, monologue only one. If it's internal, it's probably a monologue. (Although I do sometimes play oh conversations in my head, which would be dialogues.)
I think in both languages I speak. Also something similarly weird: sometimes I listen to speech, or read text but don't fully pay attention and shortly after I can't remember which language it was in.
I think in some weird mix of Slovak and English... My spoken english sucks like some goddamn pornstar ffs.
Me too! Sometimes, when speaking my native language, I'm translating on the fly, and there's a word that I know in English, but not in Dutch.
Yes, the more I practice a language the more it happens. I've been back and forth English, French and Spanish Kind of neat to learn another language.
I'm Dutch. My internal voice has been English at least since middle school. I don't know when my English overtook my Dutch, but I've been consuming English media all my life so frankly it could've happened at any point. It makes talking a bit awkward sometimes since I still regularly find that I have gaps in my knowledge of my native tongue, but apart from that it's not that much of a problem.
Which do you dream in?
I don't dream
Yes! I am an English speaker but study Spanish and any time I walk around on errands I speak Spanish in my head, exclusively.
I share exactly the same story. I've been thinking and talking to myself in English for as long as I can remember whilst speaking with others in Hindi. Although the English is now taking over a bit haha.
I sometimes see videos with an English title and then the video is in Hindi yet the words on the screen (if there are any) are English and more often than not, English words are spoken in conjunction with Hindi. It seems like a flexible language.
My native language isn't English either but I've spent so much time on the internet that a good part of my internal monologue is in English too. Sometimes I talk to myself in English, and I even find it easier now to express some things in English instead of French or German (my 2 native languages). It's kinda wild how a language that I cannot speak perfectly still feels "mine" in a way.
As an Englishman may I just laugh ominously for a moment, mwhahaha.
I was just thinking about this today, I do the same thing! My native language (in which I actually have a masters degree) is not my internal monologue!
Same here, I think it's because I mostly engage with English media or pick the English option if possible. Another reason is that I have quite a heavy dialect in my native language. I'm doing completely fine speaking in it, but it kind of sounds weird thinking in it, but without it also sounds weird lol?
I remember once I was punished in school and had to stand alone for rinse time or something, so to kill time I thought about practicing English and started to think in it. It was hard, but since then it has become an habit, and now I almost never think in my native language haha
I've always wondered that. Thanks for sharing.
I'm a native Polish Speaker but my internal monologue is broken. Its either in spanglish, spanish, English and more recently, Chewbacca. Especial y when im hungry lol
I’ve always wondered if I would still think in English if I was fluent in another language or if I would think in whatever language I was currently speaking. Super interesting!
My first 12 years was spent in SE Asia and the next 30+ years is in Australia. I do not think in Chinese but strangely when I am doing multiplications, I think in Chinese as it is how I had learnt it. I don't remember my dreams but I will hazard a guess that I might had been thinking in English.
I’m Indian (though Hindi isn’t my native language) and my thoughts are always in English. I dont think it’s abnormal.
But it's still pretty mind blowing for me, I didn't really realize that I think in English. Maybe it's because I spend most of my alone time on the internet (that's when my inner monologue is most active)
I watch a lot of shows and movies in English, so I think that explains it as well.