What happens when the person you love doesn't share your first language? Research suggests there may be misunderstandings, improvised vocabulary and the occasional linguistic disaster. But over time, couples can create something rather wonderful: a language that belongs to them.

Falling in love is complicated enough when two people speak the same language.

Now imagine doing it when they don't.

One person says something affectionate.

The other looks offended.

A joke is delivered beautifully and receives complete silence.

An innocent idiom produces alarm.

And at some point during an argument, somebody discovers that the vocabulary acquired through years of language classes did not include the phrase:

“That is absolutely not what I meant.”

For couples who grew up speaking different languages, these moments can become part of married life.

But research into bilingual and intercultural relationships suggests something more interesting than a catalogue of misunderstandings.

Over time, couples can become remarkably good at communicating across linguistic differences.

They borrow words. They switch languages. They invent expressions. They gesture. They clarify. They develop private jokes that would make very little sense to anybody else.

Eventually, the language they use together may not quite belong to either partner anymore.

It belongs to the marriage.

Welcome to the “Couple Tongue”

Linguist Kaisa Pietikäinen studied seven established intercultural couples who used English as their common language, even though it was not necessarily their first language.

The couples recorded more than 24 hours of their ordinary private conversations.

What did researchers discover?

Surprisingly, misunderstandings weren't particularly frequent.

These couples had become rather accomplished at preventing them.

When words failed, they asked direct questions. They pointed at things. They showed each other objects. They acted things out. They drew pictures. They made sounds.

Essentially, they used whatever worked.

The researcher described their shared language as a “couple tongue.”

This seems both scientifically interesting and entirely recognizable.

After enough years together, pointing vaguely toward the kitchen while making a noise can apparently constitute legitimate marital communication.

Whether this represents advanced bilingualism or simply marriage is perhaps a question for another study.

Sometimes Knowing Someone Too Well Is the Problem

One of Pietikäinen's most interesting findings concerned something called the “common ground fallacy.”

Because intimate partners know each other so well, they sometimes assume that less explanation is necessary.

The speaker thinks:

Obviously she knows what I'm talking about.

The listener thinks:

I have absolutely no idea what he's talking about.

Ironically, familiarity both helps couples understand one another and sometimes creates misunderstandings, because partners expect understanding from fewer clues.

This may be the point at which bilingual marriage begins looking suspiciously similar to every other marriage.

The problem is no longer:

“You don't understand my language.”

It becomes:

“You should know what I meant.”

Linguistics can only take us so far.

Love Can Feel Different in Another Language

Things become particularly interesting when emotion enters the conversation.

Jean-Marc Dewaele and Lora Salomidou studied 429 people in intercultural relationships to examine what happens when people express love and emotion in a language that isn't their first.

About half reported difficulties with emotional communication at the beginning of their relationships.

Some couldn't find precisely the words they wanted. Others understood the vocabulary but felt that the foreign language lacked the emotional resonance of their first language. A smaller group initially felt less genuine expressing emotions in it.

That makes intuitive sense.

There is a substantial difference between knowing how to order dinner in another language and knowing how to explain why something your husband said three days ago is still bothering you.

Language classes tend not to cover this.

But something remarkable happened over time.

For more than three-quarters of participants who initially encountered these difficulties, the obstacles diminished within months.

As relationships continued, people became emotionally socialized in the language they shared with their partner.

A foreign language could eventually become what the researchers called a “language of the heart.”

A language learned for school, work or travel can acquire an entirely new emotional history because it becomes associated with one particular person.

Even “I Love You” Isn't Quite the Same

Dewaele explored this question more broadly in a study of 1,459 multilingual adults speaking 77 different first languages.

Participants were asked about the emotional weight of saying “I love you” in their different languages.

For the majority, the phrase felt strongest in their first language.

But not for everyone.

Its emotional force was associated with factors including language dominance, when and how another language had been learned, proficiency, and how extensively people had become socially immersed in it.

This helps explain something important about bilingual relationships.

Words do not carry emotional meaning solely because of their dictionary definitions.

They acquire meaning through experience.

The language in which someone first heard bedtime stories, was comforted as a child, argued with her parents or experienced adolescent embarrassment may carry emotional associations accumulated over decades.

A second language begins without much of that history.

But then something happens.

Someone falls in love in it.

New memories accumulate.

The language changes.

Apparently, Swearing Is Complicated Too

Researchers have also investigated multilingual swearing.

Yes, somebody got funding for this.

And the findings are useful.

In research involving more than 1,000 multilingual participants, swearwords were generally perceived as having greater emotional force in people's first language than in languages learned subsequently.

Other research suggests multilingual speakers can experience their native and foreign languages differently when swearing, lying, praying or saying “I love you.”

Which raises an intriguing domestic possibility.

A person may switch languages during an argument not because the other language contains objectively superior insults, but because certain words simply feel stronger in the language in which they first acquired them.

There is, however, an obvious tactical disadvantage to reverting to your first language during an argument with a spouse who doesn't speak it.

You may deliver the most eloquent expression of indignation of your adult life.

Your partner may respond:

“What?”

Momentum can be difficult to recover.

Then There Are the Words That Don't Quite Exist

Anyone who speaks more than one language eventually encounters words that resist tidy translation.

The dictionary may offer an equivalent, but something doesn't feel quite right.

Perhaps one word sounds more affectionate.

Perhaps another feels too formal.

Perhaps a pet name that sounds charming in one language becomes deeply peculiar when translated literally into another.

This is where bilingual couples often stop behaving like language students.

Instead of insisting on perfect translation, they simply borrow the better word.

Pietikäinen's broader research on intercultural couples found that partners frequently drew from their multilingual repertoires and that this mixing could eventually become an ordinary, habitual part of their couple tongue.

The resulting conversation might horrify a language teacher.

But the couple understands it perfectly.

And that is the point.

Sometimes the Words Aren't the Problem

Of course, different first languages often accompany different cultural backgrounds.

That introduces another possibility.

Sometimes both people understand every word perfectly.

They still misunderstand each other.

One culture may value directness.

Another may consider the same language unnecessarily blunt.

One person may make a request indirectly because that feels polite.

The other may fail to recognize that a request was made at all.

Ideas about affection, family obligations, privacy, money, hospitality and disagreement can also differ.

So an apparent translation problem may actually be a problem of interpretation.

The sentence was translated correctly.

The meaning wasn't.

Research on intercultural marriage has consequently looked beyond vocabulary alone. One study found that communication competence before marriage was associated with greater subsequent marital satisfaction among the intercultural couples studied.

Another study of intercultural marriages found marital satisfaction was related to the quantity of conversation and emotional and semantic understanding between partners rather than simply the particular language or culture involved.

That distinction matters.

Different languages do not doom a relationship to misunderstanding.

Communication remains something couples can learn.

There May Even Be an Advantage

Here the research leaves us with an intriguing possibility.

If you know that your partner grew up speaking another language, misunderstanding is always plausible.

So you may learn to check.

“Did you mean...?”

“I don't understand that expression.”

“Is that a joke?”

“Are you angry with me?”

And occasionally:

“Please never say that to my mother.”

That habit of clarification may be useful well beyond bilingual relationships.

All couples make assumptions.

All couples occasionally hear something different from what their partner intended.

All couples develop shorthand.

Bilingual couples simply have a rather obvious reminder that understanding should not always be assumed.

In fact, in Pietikäinen's recordings, the couples actively used a wide range of strategies to establish shared understanding. Their linguistic differences had not prevented intimacy; negotiating those differences had become part of their intimacy.

Eventually, You Stop Translating

Perhaps this is the most interesting part.

At the beginning of an intercultural relationship, language differences can feel very visible.

One person searches for a word.

The other waits.

Someone corrects the grammar.

An idiom requires explanation.

A joke dies quietly on the kitchen table.

But years later, something else may exist.

There are words from one language that both partners use.

Words from the other.

Perhaps English joins them together.

There are deliberately mispronounced words that nobody has bothered correcting for fifteen years.

There are expressions inherited from parents.

There are private jokes.

There are sentences that begin in one language and finish in another.

And somewhere along the way, the question:

“Which language do we speak?”

becomes surprisingly difficult to answer.

Researchers call it a couple tongue.

The couple might simply call it us.

Lydia's™ Take

Sharing a first language undoubtedly makes some things easier.

But language has never guaranteed understanding.

Two people can speak identical English and spend an entire evening misunderstanding each other perfectly.

Perhaps couples who begin with different languages simply encounter one of the great truths about relationships a little earlier:

Words and meaning are not always the same thing.

Understanding another person requires curiosity, patience and occasionally the humility to say:

“I'm sorry. I have no idea what you mean.”

Over time, something rather lovely can happen.

The unfamiliar language becomes familiar.

The strange expressions become affectionate.

The mistakes become family jokes.

Words that once had to be translated no longer need translation at all.

Two people began with different mother tongues.

But somewhere between the misunderstandings, explanations, laughter and love, they created another one.

A language that belongs only to them.

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Editorial Note

This article draws on research involving multilingual and intercultural couples, but such relationships are highly diverse. Language proficiency, cultural background, personality, migration history, relationship length and individual communication styles can all influence couples' experiences. The studies discussed here describe patterns observed in particular samples and should not be interpreted as universal characteristics of bilingual or intercultural relationships.

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Research & Trusted Sources

Pietikäinen, K. S. — “Misunderstandings and Ensuring Understanding in Private ELF Talk,” Applied Linguistics. Researchers analyzed more than 24 hours of naturally occurring private conversations from seven established intercultural couples using English as a shared lingua franca. Misunderstandings were relatively infrequent, and couples employed numerous verbal and nonverbal strategies to establish shared understanding.

Oxford Academic — Misunderstandings and Ensuring Understanding in Private ELF Talk

Pietikäinen, K. S. — English as a Lingua Franca in Intercultural Relationships. Doctoral research incorporating interviews and naturally occurring conversations among intercultural couples, examining interaction, multilingual practices, identity and the development of a shared “couple tongue.”

University of Helsinki Research Portal — Intercultural Relationships and Couple Language

Dewaele, J-M. & Salomidou, L. (2017) — “Loving a Partner in a Foreign Language,” Journal of Pragmatics. Study of 429 people in intercultural relationships. Around half reported some emotional-communication difficulty early in their relationships, while for more than three-quarters of those initially experiencing obstacles, the problems diminished within months.

ScienceDirect — Loving a Partner in a Foreign Language

Dewaele, J-M. (2008) — “The Emotional Weight of I Love You in Multilinguals' Languages,” Journal of Pragmatics. Study of 1,459 multilingual adults speaking 77 first languages examining how the emotional significance of “I love you” varies across languages and personal linguistic histories.

ScienceDirect — The Emotional Weight of I Love You

Dewaele, J-M. (2004) — “The Emotional Force of Swearwords and Taboo Words in the Speech of Multilinguals,” Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development. Research involving 1,039 multilinguals found that swearwords were generally perceived as more emotionally powerful in participants' first language than in languages acquired subsequently.

Caldwell-Harris, C. L. (2014) — “Emotionality Differences Between a Native and Foreign Language,” Frontiers in Psychology. Reviews evidence that multilingual speakers can experience emotional expressions differently depending upon the language being used.

PubMed Central — Emotionality Differences Between Native and Foreign Languages

Shi, L. (2000) — “The Communication Structure of Intercultural Married Couples and Their Marital Satisfaction.” This study found marital satisfaction was associated with the quantity of conversation and emotional and semantic comprehension among the intercultural couples studied.

J-STAGE — Communication and Marital Satisfaction in Intercultural Couples