If you grew up between two languages, you already know something that monolingual advice about journaling has no way to tell you: the two languages do not hold the same things.
You can write I am angry with my mother in English and it sits on the page like a line from a form. Correct, flat, slightly clinical. The same thought in Hindi — mummy pe gussa aa raha hai — arrives with a temperature the English does not have. Not because Hindi is a warmer language in the abstract. Because that is the language the anger happened in.
We wrote before about the Hinglish switch as a small technique for getting past a stuck sentence. This essay is about why it works, and what else it lets you do.
The material is stored in the language it arrived in
Most Indian bilinguals have a fairly clean division of labour, even if they have never articulated it. The home language holds the family: parents, grandparents, the aunt with opinions, everything that happened before you were fifteen, every argument in the kitchen. English holds work, education, the professional self, and most of the vocabulary for talking about feelings as a category.
This means something awkward. The material that is hardest to write about is usually stored in the home language, while the words for examining it are in English. You reach for the family thing and find the analytical vocabulary is in the wrong room.
Aneta Pavlenko's work on emotions and multilingualism documents this at length: bilinguals consistently report different emotional intensity across their languages, with the first language typically carrying more emotional force — particularly for material acquired in childhood.1 Jean-Marc Dewaele's survey work found the same asymmetry, including the widely-reported finding that swearing and terms of endearment feel weaker in a later-learned language.2
There is a practical consequence that gets missed. Writing about your mother in English is not a neutral act of translation. It is a small act of distancing — and sometimes distancing is precisely what you need, and sometimes it is how you avoid the thing for three years.
Both directions are useful
The technique is not always write in your first language. It is that the two directions do different jobs, and knowing which you are doing is the skill.
Switching into the home language is for material that has gone abstract. If you have written the same careful paragraph about your father four times and it keeps coming out reasonable and keeps not helping, the reasonableness is the problem. Write one sentence in the language he speaks to you in. It will be blunter than anything you have written so far, and it will usually be the true sentence.
Switching into English is for material that is too hot to hold. Some things cannot be written in the language of the household because in that language they are not a sentence, they are an event. Grief often works this way. The English gives you a half-step back — enough to get it onto the page at all. That is not avoidance if you know you are doing it. It is the only available handhold.
Neither is the correct one. The mistake is only ever using the language your writing habits default to, and letting that decide which parts of your life are writable.
What this looks like on the page
It looks like a mess, and the mess is fine.
Real bilingual writing does not switch neatly at paragraph boundaries. It switches mid-sentence, at the exact word where the other language has the better fit. She said it was fine but woh bilkul theek nahi thi. Nobody would mark that as good prose. It is an entirely accurate record of a thought, and it is more accurate than either language would have managed alone.
Linguists call this code-switching, and it is worth knowing that it is not a deficiency. It is a competence — the ability to move between systems and take the best-fitting piece from each, which requires fluency in both rather than a failure in either.3
For a journal, none of this needs justifying. Nobody is reading it. The only standard is whether it holds what happened, and mixed writing frequently holds it better.
Write in Devanagari if that is what comes. Write romanised if that is faster. Change mid-paragraph. Do not go back and make it consistent — the seam is where the register changed, and the seam is informative.
The thing to watch for
One caution, because this technique has a failure mode.
If you notice that a particular person only ever appears in one language, that is worth sitting with. Sometimes it is nothing — the relationship is conducted in that language, so of course. But sometimes a person who is central to your life only ever appears in careful English, and the carefulness is doing something. It is holding them at a distance you did not consciously choose.
We would not tell you what that means, and we would be wary of anyone who did. But it is the kind of thing that only becomes visible if the writing is kept over time and someone is paying enough attention to notice which language a name arrives in. That is a fact about the record, and facts about the record are ours to show. What it says about you is yours.
A note on what we're building
Loopn is built in India and the mixed-language case is the normal case, not an edge case to be handled later. Write in English, in Hindi, in Devanagari, in whatever the sentence needs. It is kept as you wrote it — not translated into a tidier version, not normalised into one language for storage. The seam stays.
We would rather hold a sentence that is half in one language and half in another and slightly ungrammatical in both, exactly as it came, than a clean English rendering of what you approximately meant. The first is what happened. The second is a summary, and summaries are where the temperature goes.
If any of this resonated, you can read more about the journal as antidote to log-kya-kahenge or what to write when you don’t know what you’re feeling.
- Pavlenko, A. (2005). Emotions and Multilingualism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. See also Pavlenko, A. (2012). Affective processing in bilingual speakers: Disembodied cognition? International Journal of Psychology, 47(6), 405–428.
- Dewaele, J.-M. (2013). Emotions in Multiple Languages (2nd ed.). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. See also Dewaele, J.-M. (2004). The emotional force of swearwords and taboo words in the speech of multilinguals. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 25(2–3), 204–222.
- Poplack, S. (1980). Sometimes I'll start a sentence in Spanish y termino en español: Toward a typology of code-switching. Linguistics, 18(7–8), 581–618. The foundational argument that code-switching is rule-governed and requires competence in both systems.