It is a well-documented phenomenon in psycholinguistics that, under conditions of extreme emotional arousal—whether sudden rage or acute physical pain—a speaker reverts to their mother tongue, often involuntarily.
Historical evidence demonstrates that this linguistic reflex can have concrete consequences. For instance, an intelligence agent during the First World War was reportedly exposed precisely because, in the throes of labor, she spoke in her native language rather than the language of her operational environment. Pain, in this context, acts as an unmediated conduit for identity, stripping away learned or imposed linguistic behavior.
Plutarch’s account of Alexander the Great provides a compelling historical illustration of this principle. When, in a moment of uncontrollable anger, Alexander struck Cleitus, he reportedly called out “in Macedonian. Such an observation is not a mere anecdotal flourish; it is indicative of a broader linguistic truth: under extreme emotional duress, even a highly educated or multilingual individual defaults to the language of primary socialization. In Alexander’s case, this would have been the Epirote or Arvanite dialect spoken in his family and immediate environment.
This principle is not confined to historical figures. Personal experience corroborates the same phenomenon: despite prolonged immersion in English, under conditions of acute stress in the United States, I have found myself spontaneously reverting to Albanian, my mother tongue. This observation aligns with the broader psycholinguistic literature, which asserts that linguistic behavior under stress is both involuntary and revealing of identity.⁴
To deny or marginalize such evidence in historical or linguistic scholarship is to privilege ideological or nationalistic narratives over empirical observation. The involuntary emergence of the mother tongue under duress provides not only a window into individual identity but also a methodological tool for interpreting historical testimony: when anger, pain, or stress elicits a particular linguistic choice, that choice cannot be dismissed as incidental. It is a form of evidence in its own right.
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