No, Your Language Does Not Contain an Emotion English Cannot Express
Abey chutiye.
There.
That’s the problem.
Or rather, that’s what made me realize there is a problem.
A few days ago I was talking about multilingualism and casually suggested that sometimes another language can express something English somehow can’t.
And immediately I thought:
Bullshit.
What exactly can I say with abey chutiye that I cannot say in English?
“You fucking idiot.”
“Listen, jackass.”
“You absolute moron.”
“Dude, what the fuck is wrong with you?”
English is doing just fine.
Thank you very much.
Likewise:
لك يا زلمة، اسمعني شوي.
“Man, just listen to me for a second.”
Perfectly serviceable.
لا تلف وتدور، الموضوع بسيط.
“Stop going around in circles. It’s simple.”
Done.
Sunn meri baat.
“Listen to me.”
No linguistic crisis occurred.
English has not collapsed.
Nobody needs to convene the Oxford English Dictionary emergency committee.
And yet…
If I’m irritated with someone in exactly the correct way, there are moments when “abey chutiye…” comes out of me and “you idiot” absolutely will not.
Why?
And I think the answer is considerably more interesting than:
Some emotions cannot be translated.
No.
They can.
The problem isn’t translation.
The problem is biography.
Words have emotional biographies.
When I was growing up, certain emotions happened in certain languages.
That’s it.
That’s the whole fucking thing.
Someone did something extraordinarily stupid.
Abey chutiye…
Someone was refusing to understand a very simple point.
Sunn meri baat…
Someone was bullshitting and going around in circles.
لا تلف وتدور…
Someone needed to calm down and hear me out.
لك يا زلمة، اسمعني شوي.
These weren’t vocabulary exercises.
I didn’t learn:
Chutiya: noun. Fool; idiot; vulgar.
I learned chutiya while people were being chutiyas.
😂
The word arrived attached to faces.
Voices.
Friends.
Arguments.
Football matches.
School corridors.
Particular kinds of stupidity.
The exact pause before somebody said it.
The facial expression that accompanied it.
Whether you were genuinely angry or laughing while saying it.
Who could say it to whom.
How much affection could hide inside an insult.
The word wasn’t stored alone.
It arrived with a fucking entourage.
And years later, when that same emotional configuration appears…
the entourage comes back.
Semantic meaning is not emotional meaning.
This is the distinction I had been missing.
Suppose:
chutiya = idiot
At the level of dictionary meaning, we’re basically finished.
But my brain hasn’t stored:
CHUTIYA
Translation: IDIOT
It has stored a giant network.
Something more like:
chutiya
→ childhood
→ Delhi
→ friends
→ disbelief
→ playful aggression
→ anger-but-not-quite-anger
→ particular rhythm
→ particular people
→ a thousand previous occasions on which somebody was being an absolute fucking chutiya
“Idiot” has its own network.
“Jackass” has another.
“Moron” another.
“Dickhead” another.
They overlap semantically.
They are not autobiographically identical.
And multilingual people simply have more of these networks distributed across several languages.
That’s where the magic actually is.
Not in the language.
In the person.
And apparently our nervous systems agree.
This isn’t just multilingual people romanticizing their own vocabulary.
In a famous experiment, Catherine Harris, Ayşe Ayçiçeği and Jean Berko Gleason had Turkish-English bilinguals hear taboo words, reprimands and other expressions in both languages while measuring skin conductance.
The participants showed greater autonomic arousal to taboo words and childhood reprimands in their first language.
Not because Turkish contains some mystical emotional particle unavailable to English.
The obvious possibility is much more mundane:
Those words were learned inside emotional life.
“Shame on you” acquired its force through actual people shaming you.
A swear word acquired its force while people were angry, shocked, laughing, fighting, embarrassed.
Later-learned equivalents may initially arrive through classrooms, dictionaries, films or relatively emotionally neutral situations.
Different learning history.
Different associative network.
Different bodily response.
Other research has found versions of this phenomenon across many language pairings, although it isn’t some universal law that L1 must always be more emotional; proficiency, age of acquisition, context and individual history matter enormously.
And that last bit matters to me because I don’t really have a neat little:
REAL LANGUAGE → secondary foreign languages
arrangement.
English, Hindi, Urdu and Arabic all occupy substantial bits of my life.
So asking me:
Which one is your emotional language?
doesn’t make much sense.
Which emotion?
Which memory?
Which person?
Which age?
Which country?
Which version of me?
Now we’re asking the right question.
A multilingual brain may be less like four dictionaries and more like a fucking map.
Imagine my emotional vocabulary as geography.
English owns enormous territory.
Hindi owns territory.
Urdu owns territory.
Arabic owns territory.
Bulgarian, despite me not using it anything like as fluently today, has some bizarre little historical colonies that refuse to surrender.
And one of those territories is apparently:
being furious at football referees.
😂
Pederas!
World Cup semifinal.
Bulgaria versus Italy.
I was a kid.
Bulgaria lost 2–1.
And Bulgarians were furious with the French referee, Joël Quiniou, particularly over penalty claims. This isn’t some distorted childhood memory: Stoichkov publicly tore into the refereeing afterward, and the Bulgarian camp complained about an uncalled Costacurta handball.
And somewhere inside that national explosion of football rage, I repeatedly heard:
PEDERAS!
The proper Bulgarian word is related to педераст / pederast; it is also used as a contemptuous insult and is, to be clear, a homophobic slur.
I’m not offering it as enlightened twenty-first-century vocabulary.
I’m describing what happened inside my head when I was a child.
Because thirty-two years later…
a referee makes some catastrophically stupid decision while I’m playing football and, somewhere deep inside the linguistic archaeology of my brain:
PEDERAS!
😂
Why?
Does Bulgarian possess some ineffable concept of referee incompetence inaccessible to English?
Of course not.
I have options.
“Fucking idiot!”
“Are you blind?!”
“You useless bastard!”
Jesus Christ, English has possibly one of the greatest insult toolkits humanity has ever assembled.
No shortage whatsoever.
But those words weren’t playing in the background when eight-year-old-me watched Bulgaria get knocked out of the World Cup.
Pederas was.
So football-rage got wired to it.
The word became a little emotional fossil.
That’s fascinating.
Lebanese Arabic has these things everywhere.
Take:
manyak — منيك
Wonderful word.
Depending on context it can land somewhere around asshole, prick, psycho, dickhead, unpleasant bastard—and it can even be used jocularly between friends.
Again, English is not standing helplessly outside the nightclub begging Arabic to let it in.
We have asshole.
We have prick.
We have dickhead.
We have fucking lunatic.
We are fine.
Interestingly, the Levantine word itself appears to have a messy linguistic history: sources trace it to French maniaque or English maniac, subsequently reinterpreted through the rather more vulgar Arabic root ن ي ك.
Which is beautiful because even the supposedly culturally unique word turns out to be sleeping around linguistically.
Appropriate, given the root.
😂
But manyak has a social texture.
You can sometimes say it while furious.
You can say it dismissively.
You can say it laughing about your friend.
You can stretch it.
Change the pitch.
ولك يا منيييييك…
And suddenly half the information isn’t in the dictionary meaning anymore.
It’s in prosody.
Relationship.
Context.
Shared history.
Exactly the same thing English speakers do with:
“You bastard.”
Which can mean:
I hate you.
or:
You magnificent bastard, you actually did it.
Same words.
Entirely different human event.
And now, France.
Oh, France.
😂
No discussion of “untranslatable words” is complete without somebody looking wistfully toward Paris and informing us that French contains concepts too exquisite for the blunt Anglo-Saxon mind.
You know the genre.
L’esprit de l’escalier.
Ahhhhh.
The ineffable French experience of thinking of the perfect reply only after the conversation is over.
How could English possibly—
“I thought of the perfect comeback too late.”
There.
Next.
😂
Larousse literally renders the expression with English equivalents such as being “slow off the mark.”
Is l’esprit de l’escalier nicer?
Absolutely.
More compact?
Yep.
Evocative?
Very.
Does it describe an emotion or experience English speakers are incapable of conceptualizing?
Behave yourself.
Dépaysement!
Another favorite.
Dépaysement.
That feeling of being removed from your familiar surroundings—disoriented by another place or environment.
Wonderful word.
The French verb dépayser can mean taking someone out of their accustomed place or disorienting them by changing their surroundings.
English:
“I felt completely out of place.”
“Being somewhere unfamiliar was disorienting.”
“A change of scenery.”
“The strange exhilaration of being somewhere completely foreign.”
Again…
we haven’t failed.
French simply lexicalized a configuration that English generally expresses compositionally.
That’s interesting.
It tells us something about lexical history.
It doesn’t establish a new fundamental human emotion called Dépaysement that British people couldn’t experience until Eurostar opened.
“Je ne sais quoi.”
This one is particularly funny because English solved the supposed translation problem by simply fucking stealing the French.
Very English.
There was a certain je ne sais quoi about her.
Done.
Which demonstrates another important point.
Languages don’t sit inside little national fortresses guarding concepts.
They steal constantly.
English looked at French vocabulary for approximately a thousand years and said:
Mine.
French did it to others.
Arabic did it.
Persian did it.
Urdu did it.
Japanese does it.
Every large living language is basically a linguistic crime scene.
And German doesn’t own Schadenfreude either.
Ah yes.
Schadenfreude.
“An untranslatable German word!”
The uniquely Teutonic emotion of enjoying somebody else’s misfortune.
Except…
the English phrase:
pleasure at another person’s misfortune
works just fine.
We even imported Schadenfreude because one word is convenient.
English speakers did not suddenly acquire the emotion when they borrowed the noun.
English speakers had been laughing at people falling into ponds for quite some time.
German merely had a beautifully compact label available.
And that’s useful!
Lexicalization matters.
If your language has one conventional word for something, it may make that concept easier to invoke, discuss, joke about, categorize or notice.
That’s interesting linguistics.
But again:
easy to name ≠ impossible to experience without the name.
Japanese is where this gets really fun.
Because Japan has become almost a factory for internet articles titled:
17 Japanese Words That Have No English Translation
And look…
Japanese has lovely words.
Komorebi — sunlight filtering through leaves.
Beautiful.
English translation:
sunlight filtering through leaves.
I appear to have survived the ordeal.
😂
But the genuinely interesting example is amae.
The psychologist Takeo Doi famously built a theory around amae: roughly, the desire or expectation of being indulgently loved, accepted or depended upon within a close relationship.
It was often discussed as something deeply characteristic of Japanese psychology.
Wonderful.
Except researchers later did the obvious thing:
Let’s see whether Americans experience it.
They gave Japanese and American participants scenarios designed to produce amae.
And guess what?
Americans experienced recognizable versions of the same interpersonal emotion despite not having an ordinary English word for it.
HAHAHAHA.
There it is.
That might be my favorite example in the whole essay.
You can lack the word without lacking the experience.
Of course you can.
Imagine discovering a previously unnamed shade of blue.
The fact that I hadn’t named it yesterday does not mean my retina refused to process those wavelengths.
Language can sharpen categories.
Language can direct attention.
Language can provide wonderfully efficient handles.
But:
absence of lexical handle does not imply absence of human phenomenon.
Very important distinction.
Spanish would also like five minutes of your attention.
Spanish has sobremesa.
The period after a meal when everybody remains sitting around the table talking.
Lovely word.
Does English have a single conventional everyday noun for exactly that?
Not really.
Can I explain it?
I just did.
And more importantly:
Have English-speaking families ever remained at a dinner table talking after eating despite tragically lacking sobremesa?
I am willing to bet several have.
Spanish also gives us things such as duende, which can refer to a kind of charm, magnetism or artistic spirit. The Royal Spanish Academy includes senses around having charm or attraction.
Is the exact cultural network around duende captured by one English word?
Maybe not.
But again, that’s not because the emotional territory is sealed off from English speakers.
A word can package a culturally elaborated cluster without creating the underlying psychological ingredients.
That’s the distinction I’m increasingly interested in.
And yes, before a Spanish, Italian, Portuguese or French person writes to me:
No, all Romance languages are not “basically the same.”
I know.
Calm down.
I’m joking.
Ya basta.
See? I stole that too.
Eastern Europe understands the sacred art of swearing.
Polish has:
kurwa.
Now kurwa technically has a lexical meaning with a much more offensive origin.
But in actual use it can behave like:
fuck.
shit.
for fuck’s sake.
Jesus Christ.
a filler.
an intensifier.
punctuation.
possibly weather.
Possibly a conjunction if sufficient vodka has been consumed.
One recent linguistic discussion of online Polish discourse literally notes speakers joking that kurwa functions like a punctuation mark, while still retaining genuine taboo force.
English speakers will recognize this immediately because we have fuck.
“Fuck!”
“Fucking thing.”
“What the fuck?”
“Fuck me.”
“Fuck off.”
“This fucking guy.”
“Fucking brilliant.”
Same lexical item.
A small grammatical civilization.
The Polish emotional ecosystem around kurwa isn’t identical to the English ecosystem around fuck.
Of course not.
Different histories.
Different people.
Different social taboos.
Different rhythm.
But the underlying revelation isn’t:
Polish contains an emotion unavailable to English.
It’s:
different speech communities attach overlapping human emotions to different linguistic handles.
And individual multilinguals inherit several sets of handles.
Which means translation is asking the wrong question.
People love asking:
What’s the exact English translation?
Sometimes there isn’t one word.
So what?
Why should there be?
Languages don’t evolve as synchronized spreadsheets.
French gets one lexical item.
Hindi uses a phrase.
Arabic develops an idiom.
English uses three words.
Polish turns a prostitute into punctuation.
Humanity marches onward.
The important question isn’t:
What single English token occupies exactly the same dictionary coordinates?
The question is:
Can I communicate the underlying experience?
Almost always, yes.
Maybe it takes a sentence.
Maybe I need context.
Maybe I need tone.
Maybe I need a story.
But that’s not linguistic failure.
That’s normal communication.
“Untranslatable” usually means something much weaker.
When people say:
This word is untranslatable!
they generally mean one of several things.
There is no single-word equivalent.
Or:
The word carries cultural associations that require explanation.
Or:
The word’s emotional force changes when translated.
Or:
There is a joke, rhythm, historical reference or connotation that gets lost.
All legitimate.
But none means:
Speakers of other languages cannot represent this thought.
That’s a gigantic leap.
And I’m increasingly suspicious of it because it takes something genuinely fascinating—
the cultural and autobiographical life of words
—and replaces it with something much more mystical:
languages possessing private emotions.
No.
The first explanation is better.
I don’t love “abey chutiye” because Hindi contains superior stupidity.
This might be the simplest version.
Hindi doesn’t understand idiots better than English does.
Lebanese Arabic doesn’t understand assholes better than English does.
Bulgarian doesn’t understand incompetent referees better than English does.
French does not understand delayed comebacks better than the rest of humanity.
Japanese people aren’t issued an extra emotional organ containing amae at birth.
Poles aren’t genetically supplied with kurwa.
The words became good handles for things.
Then humans lived inside those words.
And after decades of use, some of those handles became worn exactly to the shape of our hands.
That’s the beauty.
Language is part of memory.
There’s another piece of research that makes this even more interesting.
Studies of bilingual autobiographical memory find that the language in which you cue a memory can interact with the language associated with the remembered period.
In one study of English-Hebrew bilingual immigrants, people sometimes retrieved memories in a different language from the one being used in the experiment; researchers called these “crossover” memories. Their narratives also contained more code-switching around those memories.
That feels intuitively right to me.
I don’t merely remember events.
Some memories have languages.
Some people exist in particular languages in my head.
Some eras do.
Some jokes.
Some arguments.
Some versions of myself.
There are people I can speak to in English perfectly fluently and yet switching to Hindi suddenly brings out a completely different conversational rhythm.
Arabic can produce another.
Not because I have four personalities.
But because language is one of the retrieval cues for a gigantic web of social memory.
You’re not switching dictionaries.
You’re walking into another room of the same house.
And the furniture is different.
This also explains why people sometimes become “different” in another language.
You hear multilingual people say:
I’m funnier in Spanish.
I’m more serious in German.
I feel colder speaking English.
I’m more affectionate in Arabic.
People sometimes turn this into linguistic mysticism.
“Arabic is the language of emotion.”
“German is logical.”
“French is romantic.”
Oh for fuck’s sake.
Those are enormous cultural stereotypes pretending to be cognitive science.
A much more interesting possibility is:
What did you DO in that language?
Maybe German was your professional language.
Maybe Arabic was home.
Maybe English was school.
Maybe Spanish was friends and parties.
Maybe French was the person you fell in love with.
Maybe one language was where adults disciplined you.
Maybe another was where you first had sex.
Maybe another is where you learned science.
Maybe another is where you prayed.
Maybe another is the language in which your mother shouted your entire legal name from the other end of the house.
That language now has data attached to it.
Years of it.
Of course activating it can alter your emotional stance.
Language isn’t operating alone.
It’s opening the folder.
And sometimes the “foreign” language is actually the safer one.
There’s another fascinating wrinkle.
Some bilingual people report that taboo subjects or emotional material can actually be easier to discuss in a later-learned language because it creates psychological distance. Research on multilingual emotion and code-switching has repeatedly investigated this distancing effect.
Which makes complete sense.
Suppose your childhood language contains:
sex = shame
swearing = punishment
“I love you” = enormous emotional exposure
family conflict = danger
Then saying something in another language may feel less loaded.
Same semantic content.
Less autobiography attached.
So:
“I love you.”
might come easier than its equivalent in the language in which those words carried terrifying emotional weight.
Or the opposite.
Which again destroys the simplistic:
L1 = emotional, L2 = intellectual
model.
No.
History matters.
A word is not merely a definition.
This is probably where I’ve landed.
A dictionary tells you what a word means.
But a human being doesn’t contain dictionaries.
We contain associations.
If I say:
home
the dictionary gives:
the place where one lives.
My brain may give:
a smell.
a door.
a person.
a period of life.
safety.
claustrophobia.
a kitchen.
a loss.
The word is a key.
The lock is autobiographical.
And if you’ve lived seriously in several languages, you have keys cut by several locksmiths.
So multilingual code-switching isn’t linguistic failure.
This is another thing multilinguals occasionally get judged for.
Someone is speaking Hindi and inserts English.
Or Arabic and suddenly jumps to French.
Or English and:
abey chutiye…
And some purist goes:
Ah, they couldn’t find the proper word.
Maybe.
Sometimes.
But often the person knows the equivalent perfectly well.
They chose the other one.
Because it fits.
Not semantically.
Experientially.
The emotional register was there.
The joke was there.
The person being addressed lives there.
The memory lives there.
The rhythm lives there.
And recent work even suggests that code-switches can function communicatively to highlight information that is especially salient or unexpected.
So perhaps multilingual speech isn’t a broken version of monolingual speech.
Perhaps sometimes it’s richer routing.
You have four roads to the same conceptual neighborhood and you take whichever one your brain knows best from where you’re currently standing.
Which brings me back to “abey chutiye.”
I could say:
You idiot.
Correct.
I could say:
You fucking moron.
Also correct.
I could say:
يا غبي.
Correct again.
But there is some precise cocktail of affection, annoyance, disbelief and impending explanation where my brain reaches for:
Abey chutiye, sunn meri baat…
And now I think I understand why.
Not because Hindi discovered an emotion English forgot.
Not because India has some ancient metaphysical relationship with idiots.
Not because multilingual people possess concepts unavailable to monolingual peasants.
😂
It’s because I have been here before.
Many times.
And when I was there…
this is what it sounded like.
The feeling remembers the language.
That’s the sentence I’ve been looking for.
Sometimes a multilingual person doesn’t switch languages because the first language has failed.
We switch because the feeling remembers the language in which we learned to feel it.
That is so much more interesting to me than “untranslatable words.”
Because now language isn’t some mystical prison determining what humans can experience.
It’s part of the machinery by which experience gets stored.
The phrase carries the residue of every previous time it mattered.
And sometimes, thirty years later, an incompetent football referee blows his whistle…
some ancient Bulgarian neuron wakes from its fucking coma…
looks around…
realizes that once again justice has abandoned the world…
and screams:
PEDERAS!