I am Begüm. I am from Istanbul, Turkey. Both of my parents are Turkish. I speak Turkish (native language), English and French fluently. I have started learning Spanish here at Stanford.
When I came to Stanford back in September, I realized "the tricky relationship" between myself and the languages I speak. Back in Turkey, I used to speak to my mum in French for practice purposes from time to time, and I would speak to my teachers in English. However, Turkish was still the language that I used extensively in my daily life. This changed when I came to the United States. Now, all aspects of my daily life are constructed around a foreign language, and I have this ongoing translation process in my brain. Learning a foreign language in another foreign language and translating things back and forth in my mind without even realizing it are all interesting notions. Even though I have no difficulty with understanding and speaking in English, at certain moments, especially when I am tired or stressed out, I feel the urge to stop speaking in English and explain myself in Turkish to people. I feel that it is the language in which I can communicate my emotions and thoughts precisely. I believe that this dilemma made me realize how different languages I speak have a significant impact on the way I live, and I want to learn about the scientific findings on how and why this is happening.
There is an interesting story about how I realized a change in the way that I think in a different language. While I was telling a past event which I heard from someone else to one of my roommates, I did not make it clear to her that I actually did not witness it myself. This actually caused a lot of confusion. When she asked me whether I have witnessed the event myself, I thought that it was a rather weird question since she is supposed to understand that from the way I conjugate the verbs. Suddenly, I realized that I was talking in English and not in Turkish. Turkish has two different past tenses. One of them is to describe the events we witnessed, and the other one is to describe the events we overheard or inferred. It is a very interesting notion which implicitly requires the speaker to specify his source of knowledge at any time he refers to a past event.
I realized another interesting point after I moved to the States. Here, pronouncing my name is quite difficult for people. Some of them try at least 10-15 times to pronounce my name. There are some people who cannot pronounce it no matter how hard they try. When I was traveling to France a couple of years ago, I came up with something that made it easier for French people to pronounce my name. In French, "legume", the word for vegetable, is pronounced in the same way as my name, except my name starts with a "b" instead of an "l." That actually made it very easy for French speakers to pronounce my name. In the beginning, I thought that the same analogy would not be that helpful in the States as not many people speak French here. However, what I realized over time is that, when I explain the analogy between the French word "legume" and "Begüm", non-French speakers have an easier time pronouncing my name. Most of them said that they have heard of neither "legume" or "Begüm." I believe that introducing them with a more familiar language makes it easier to pronounce my name. Because, most people here are acquainted with the French language more than they are with Turkish. They all know that French people speak French, but there are lots of people who ask me whether my native language is Arabic and whether there is a language called Turkish. Interestingly, to present them with an analogy in a language which they at least know that it exists, like French, makes it easier for them to pronounce a Turkish name, even though they may not be aware of the existence of a distinct language called Turkish.
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