The Language That Was Chosen Once

When two people share more than one language, they tend to keep speaking whichever one they used first. The pattern holds even after fluency changes, even after one language becomes more convenient than the other.

I noticed this after learning Spanish in Chile. With anyone I met after becoming fluent, I spoke Spanish. With anyone I had met before, I still spoke English. The original language had never been revisited.

There were people I had known for years, people I now saw weekly, with whom my Spanish was better than theirs. It would have been easier to switch. But the first conversation had set the terms, and those terms had never been renegotiated.

No one refused to switch. No one insisted on English. The question simply never arose. To continue required nothing. To switch would have required a moment of explanation—and that moment never came.

The initial condition, chosen once and never examined, became the permanent baseline.