Last night at stats class, I had the strangest sensation. We were in the midst of a cryptanalysis problem (relative frequency makes statisticians moist) and our instructor was momentarily at a loss for the number of letters in the alphabet. "26!" came the roar from the helpful sophomores. 23, I thought automatically.

23? What?

Oh yeah. There's 23 letters in the modern Hebrew alphabet. My underlanguage is showing again.

In linguistics, specifically the study of second language acquisition, there's a concept known as interference. Basically: a learner of a second (third, fourth, nth) language will be merrily burbling along in their adopted tongue when a word or phrase from their native tongue will come slithering up the stem and jump unbidden into the middle of the sentence. That's right. Sometimes you're cool and poised and glamorous, and other times the spider monkey portion of your brain runs rampant.

Interference usually affects me in a curious and specific manner. I speak two-point-two languages: English (hi!), French (mmm, dusty!) and Hebrew (just enough to get shot). English is my native tongue, I took a gazillion years of French in high school and college, and just started studying Hebrew a couple of years ago.

I can't remember English ever interfering with French class (then again I don't remember a ton of French class besides the fact that halfway through freshman year, Mrs Morrigan (not her real name y'all) poked her eye out with a mascara wand while driving one day and suddenly showed up with a glass eyeball, launching a thousand snarky notes in lockers). But in Hebrew class, whenever I groped for a word, the French one popped up before the English. One time, while giving an oral presentation on deli food, the English words wouldn't come at all and I wound up describing not eggs or beitsim (bayt-zeem), but oefs. This was an instance of my native tongue not only failing to interfere, but in fact fucking right off for a two week holiday. Hey it felt like two weeks up there in front of the class (very few of whom spoke French).

Only when I checked with other grad students did I find that this wasn't a unique phenomenon, that everyone else's brain reacts the same way: if you speak more than two languages, the last two you learned will start fucking with each other, like they're both trying to occupy the same cells.

If you think it sounds weird, you have no idea how odd it *feels*.

For the next round of grad school I'm going to have to throw American Sign Language (ASL) into the mix. I don't as yet know a lot about ASL, beyond the fact that ASL translators make a lot more money than clinical research coordinators. Oh, and there was a deaf homeless woman who used to stand at the intersection of Ashby and San Pablo, who would babble to herself using her hands. It was fascinating (yes I am nothing if not a font of cultural sensitivity).
I haven't read anything about hand-tongue interference, but knowing me it will wind up being spectacularly public and embarrassing.

*Ayin is the 15th letter of the Hebrew alphabet. When I'm singing the alphabet I usually put it last. Why I do that, is someone else's thesis.