> "From research we know that as a bilingual or multilingual, whenever you're speaking, both languages or all the languages that you know are activated," says M

> "From research we know that as a bilingual or multilingual, whenever you're speaking, both languages or all the languages that you know are activated," says Mathieu Declerck, a senior research fellow at the Vrije Universiteit in Brussels. "For example, when you want to say 'dog' as a French-English bilingual, not just 'dog' is activated, but also its translation equivalent, so 'chien' is also activated." I feel like this happens more for languages which are quite close to each other e.g. romance languages. On the other hand if you are speaking some language quite distinct in their script and sound, this doesn't happen that often.