I spend most of my day-to-day switching between Lithuanian and English, the languages I use at work, at home, when chatting with friends online, and so on. However, whenever I need to count the number of pizza slices or calculate my taxes, my brain auto-switches to Russian. Yes, at the shop, I mumble under my nose in square letters.
And apparently, I’m not alone! The other day I caught a BBC World Service segment (yes, I’m the snob listening to the BBC in my car) about bi-, tri-, and multi-linguals resorting to their mother tongue when counting. Or rather, they resort to the language they were first instructed Maths in. In my case, this checks out as true, as I did go to a Russian medium school.
I couldn’t find the original BBC report, but there’s a bit of research that sheds some light on the matter better than the chuckling British radio hosts. For example, a self-reported study of more than 1400 multilinguals in 20071 showed the following:
The findings of the study fully support hypothesis 1, that speakers’ L1 isusually the pre ferred language for mental calculation with monotonic de-cline for languages learned subsequently. Multilinguals’ preference for theL1 may be linked to the fact that this specific cognitive operation hasmost probably been learnt in the L1, which was typically also the dominant language. This corroborates the general findings that bilingual s prefer to perform arithmetic operations in the language of instruction whichis usually the L1 (cf. Bialystok 2005; Tamamaki 2003). Despite this, theanswer to our first research question is negative: mental calculation doesnot happen exclusively in the L1. The L2 is reported, on average, to beused ‘‘sometimes’’ too. Moreover, three percent of participants reported‘‘never’’ using the L1 anymore for mental calculation, which shows, contrary to the observation by Dehaene (1997), that L1 attrition can a¤ectcognitive processes in the L1.
This Reddit thread has a bunch of people affirming the statement as well.
However, the question I have to researchers (and anyone, really) is this: “What role do counting-out games play in all of this?”
Now, a counting-out game is a simple method of selecting a person from a group, often used by children for the purpose of playing a game. For example:
Eeny, meeny, miny, moe,
Catch a tiger by the toe.
If he hollers, let him go,
Eeny, meeny, miny, moe.
(side note: according to mid-20th century folklorists, some US versions of the rhyme used the n-word instead of tiger, which only adds to the layers of racially charged nursing rhymes).
Now, arguably, kids learn counting-out games before sitting through their first Arithmetics class. And many counting-out games actually feature numbers. So should I be thanking the counting-out game of my childhood for making Russian my Maths language? The grim counting-out game that I still resort to when counting, involved killing bunnies:
Раз, два, три, четыре, пять, — One, two, three, four, five
Вышел зайчик погулять. — Little bunny went for a walk
Вдруг охотник выбегает, — A hunter jumped out of nowhere
Прямо в зайчика стреляет. — He shot right at the bunny
Пиф — паф! Ой-ой-ой! — Boom-bam, ouchie ouchie
Умирает зайчик мой. — My bunny’s now dead.
Conclusion? The languages we speak, and the sequence we acquire them in might impact some of our behaviour that is not necessarily 100% language-related. Or maybe not. Linguistic relativity is rabbit hole I’m not ready to go down yet.
And what about you, my dear reader? What language do you count your blessings in?
Dewaele, Jean-Marc. (2007). Multilinguals' language choice for mental calculation. Intercultural Pragmatics. 4. 343-376. 10.1515/IP.2007.017.
No question. I had a collage who in a critical moment though I had made a simple but very consequential mistake in arithmetic in a document we were reviewing, snitched into Catalan to count. I knew he was from Spain and heard him speak perfect Spanish. I had never realized his first language was Catalan.
BTW, here is the counting out rhyme in Spanish.
De tin marín de dos pingüé*, or [Tin marín de dos pingüín]
Cúcara, mácara, títere fue,
Yo no fui, fue Teté,
Pégale, pégale, al quien fue
Oh and there is a much worse Eeny meny
Eeny, meny, miny, moe.
Catch a [] by the toe.
If he hollers, make him pay
Fifty dollars every day
My English-Spanish bilingual daughter says eny meny / Tin marin depends on context, but she does arithmetic in English.
Yep. I was born in Russia and spoke the language at home, but grew up in Israel where I also first went to kindergarten and to school. I do my counting and arithmetic in Hebrew.