Languages: a reason other than the baguettes to be an expat

Most of the time back home in the US, my fascination by language, linguistic evolution, and how history is reflected in the structure and vocabulary of a language is all a bit of a quirk. This is one reason why I love living in Europe: with so many different cultures and languages in such a dense space (there are tens of languages and countless dialects in an area around a half of the size of the US!) crossing language barriers here is a way of life. At my yoga school's sat chakra (monthly social event) last night, I shared a meal and conversation with six other people: an Argentinian, a Portuguese woman from Portugal, a Portuguese woman raised mostly in francophone Switzerland, a Polish woman, and two French men. Between the seven us, we had five different native languages and spoke over ten languages total. Furthermore, everyone was happy to chat about the differences in their own languages and others, from regional ones ("Have you noticed the wild sounds in Finnish? When I was in Helsinki, I couldn't understand anything!" ; "When in Sweden, it's really not too hard to get the gist of what they're saying if you've studied some English: grammatically as well as in their vocabulary, the two languages are so similar. A funny thing when you consider their neighbors the Finns." ; "It's true, Portuguese really has an Eastern European sound-set to it." etc.) to commentary even on the theory of language in other parts of the world ("Isn't it wild how Mandarin and Cantonese are written exactly the same even if the two spoken languages are not at all alike? That's what happens when your written language isn't phonetic" etc.)

My yoga school: a rich place for linguistic discussion

I was just tickled to be able to sit around with a group of people all equally interested in discussing language, grammar theory, historical events that influenced language development, and even how the mind learns language. And further still, I didn't even have to seek out linguistic scholars: these people were yoga instructors, an engineering student, a hospital worker, a business marketing researcher, a software programmer, and me, the high-resolution neuronal imaging PhD student. You just don't find crowds like this full of people who speak and are actively interested in many languages and the theory of language, back home in the US. At least, not in a random yoga school and in a crowd of people not at all gathered for a language-related purpose. Another reason to do the expat-thing. :)