our multilingual brain

Around Christmas time more than thirty years ago I was evacuated from a dormitory in a small University in California to a homestay in a city about 20 miles from downtown LA. Nothing dramatic happened. The dormitories were closed during Christmas break so my Indonesian friends and I had to be accommodated elsewhere before we all flying to our Universities. This was the time when I was in the US to pursue my master's degree. There were six of us in that campus and we all went our own ways to different Universities (of which some I would not see face to face until today) 

I was assigned to a house of an International couple. The husband is an American and the wife is Japanese. I recall they had two daughters (or one? I could not be sure anymore - memory fades rather quickly). The daughters speak both Japanese and English seamlessly. Depending to whom the were speaking they would either speak English or Japanese. Without thinking. Obviously they are multilingual

Come to think of it I too am a multilingual. I speak Bahasa Indonesia, Sundanese, Javanese. Later on I learned French and even though I do not speak it fluently I am sure I would not be lost in Francophone world as I would be able to be understood. Checking google it looks like the number of monolingual is less than multilingual

I guess it is getting easier to learn more than one language. English would certainly be learned to some degree by many people (1.5 billions). Most products comes with English menu or manual. Many popular songs and movies are in English. So people would soak English anyhow. 

Sometime I experience that I understand what I am hearing and later asked myself what language did I hear ? Was it Malay, Indonesian or English (obviously the setting was an in flight announcement). Somehow my brain just process the words that I am hearing so that I understand the message - but which language was that ? I had to pay extra attention to recognize the language. But the understanding is there. As if it is independent of the words I just heard

What a marvelous brain we have