Why Bilinguals "Make Up" Words (And Why That's Perfectly Normal)

Understanding the Beautiful Chaos of Multilingual Minds

Picture by Sander Sammy, from Unsplash

I was sitting in an interpreting class in Salamanca, reading something in English and discussing it in Spanish, when I almost said letra instead of carta. I caught myself mid-sentence, recognizing the mental gymnastics my brain had just performed—thinking of one word, then quickly switching to the one I actually wanted. My interpreting professor's reaction was swift and harsh: "We should never let English influence how we sound in Spanish."

I believed there was something fundamentally wrong with me. It took completing a Ph.D. in second language acquisition and bilingualism to understand what was actually happening—and why there was absolutely nothing wrong with me.

The Cognitive Dance of Translation

Letter can be translated to Spanish as letra (as in "la letra R") or as carta (when you send a letter to someone). Letter and letra are cognates—words that sound alike across languages and often share meaning. The challenge arises when two words sound similar but carry different meanings. That's when our brains must work harder, and it's precisely why translators need extensive training.

Your brain naturally gravitates toward words that sound alike. Learning to recognize when choosing familiar-sounding words changes the meaning requires conscious effort and practice.

When Innovation Meets Necessity

Years later, I was speaking Spanish with a friend in New York when I heard myself say, "Claro, porque tienes miedo de retaliación." I immediately cringed. Four years of translation professors treating such "mistakes" as sacrilege had left me traumatized. I knew retaliación doesn't exist in Spanish—the correct word is represalias. But it took me several seconds to retrieve it.

What had my mind done? It took the English word "retaliation" and created a Spanish-sounding version. My invented word was phonologically plausible in Spanish, following the language's morphological patterns perfectly.

The Science Behind the "Mistake"

Why did this happen? Retaliation isn't a high-frequency word in everyday conversation, but working at a criminal justice-focused college, I encounter it regularly in English. I knew its meaning but had rarely needed to express this concept in Spanish—until I had to interpret for a Title IX investigation. While preparing for that assignment, I specifically studied represalias as the Spanish equivalent.

This illustrates a crucial point: which words come to mind first depends entirely on activation frequency. The language in which we most commonly encounter and use specific concepts becomes our default pathway for accessing those ideas.

Why I Noticed (And Why You Might Not)

My translator training made me hypersensitive to these linguistic crossovers. I'd been conditioned to feel terrible about such "errors." And yes, in professional interpreting or translation, precision is non-negotiable—retaliación cannot slip through. But in casual conversation? This phenomenon is natural and entirely expected.

When you regularly activate a word in one language, that word emerges first regardless of which language you're currently speaking.

You Do This Too (Even If You Don't Realize It)

If you regularly speak two languages, you engage in this creative word-making constantly. You might not notice, but you're continuously creating these linguistic hybrids. When groups of bilinguals who share the same language pair interact, they collectively reshape both languages.

This is exactly what happens to Spanish in the United States. Writing this from a New York-Madrid flight, I just heard the flight attendant announce, "Apreciamos su negocio"—a direct translation of an English phrase that no monolingual Spanish speaker would naturally use. A Spain-based Spanish speaker would more likely say "Muchas gracias por viajar con nosotros." But for US Spanish, primarily spoken by Spanish-English bilinguals, "apreciamos su negocio" sounds completely natural.

This exemplifies how coexisting languages inevitably influence each other.

Embracing Linguistic Creativity

What I once viewed as embarrassing mistakes, I now understand as evidence of the remarkable flexibility and creativity of multilingual minds. Our brains constantly navigate between linguistic systems, creating bridges and finding solutions when exact equivalents don't readily surface.

Rather than viewing these moments as failures, we should celebrate them as demonstrations of our cognitive sophistication. Every bilingual "error" represents a small act of linguistic innovation—our minds working to communicate across the beautiful, complex landscape of human language.

The next time you catch yourself "making up" a word, remember: you're not broken. You're brilliantly bilingual.