Quick summary: Language operates through separate subconscious and conscious systems, shaping how people speak, think, and respond under stress. Emotional states and dreaming rely on the native language, highlighting its deep link to identity, mental processing, and well-being. This has practical implications for mental health care, suggesting communication, therapy, and assessment should account for language context and emotional state.
Ordinarily, language is a means of communication. But when you take a closer look at it, when you look at it through the lens of how the human mind actually stores, processes and produces language, it is starting to look a lot more complex. It is not a one-system system. It is stratified, it is dispersed throughout the various mental structures and is subject to various rules according to the state of consciousness it is functioning in. Next is a conceptual model of the process of learning how language is structured between the unconscious and conscious mind, and what such a structure tells us about the inner organisation of human thought.
Two systems, two languages
The main argument of this theory is that the human mind does not process languages in the same place and at the same rate. Rather, language processing splits in two complimentary systems: the subconscious and the conscious mind. Every system possesses its own way of storage, its own relation to language and its own expressive style.
The initial system is the subconscious. It works in the first or native language the first language learned in early childhood before any formal training occurred. This language did not come in the form of grammar tables and vocabulary drills. It was internalised in the way of immersion, in the very crude way of being in a language world. Due to this, it becomes incorporated on a lower plane than conscious thinking. It is unconscious, intuitive and highly connected with emotional experience.
The second system is the conscious mind and these are the languages learned by effort and will, second languages, foreign languages or any language that needed to be studied. These are memorised by means of deliberate memorisation, application of rules, and practice. They reside in a consciously controlled mental realm and are accessed by way of active processing and not by intuition.
These two systems are not independent of each other, yet they are still different. Image, reflex, and emotion are the three forms that the native language is stored and retrieved in the subconscious. The learned language is stored in the conscious mind in the form of the symbol, rule and structure.
Emotion the gate to the subconscious
The connection between language production and emotional state is one of the implications of this theory that is more observable. When faced with an emotional stress situation, such as anger, grief, fear or sudden joy people consistently switch to their mother tongue, no matter how well they know their second language. This does not amount to language learning failure. It is an architectural aspect of the arrangement of linguistic knowledge in the mind.
In cases of high emotional arousal, conscious control is low. The conscious, rule-based system controlling second language production is loosened and the subconscious, with its quicker and more automatic processes, assumes control. The native tongue leaps forward, not by the decision of the speaker, but by the structure of the mind under emotional stress which directs expression through instinct instead of thought.
This tendency implies that there is something important about the native language: it is not just communication. It is the prime channel where emotional self captures and conveys its experience. The acquired language, the language of the thoughtful, composed, meditated mind, the language of analysis, of bargaining, of the asseverated word, is here the language of the contemplative, serene, slow, and slow, not of the uncivilised sentiment.
Dreams and the subconscious as architect
This theoretical division seems to be the most convincing when it comes to the examination of dreams. Dreaming is the condition whereby the conscious control is virtually nonexistent. The unconscious operates on its own. And what is its language?
Regularly, in cultures and in the study of different languages, people dream in their own native tongue. It is not a preference or habit. It is the formal fault of a mind functioning devoid of its conscious stratum.
However, the image becomes more interesting. Dreams are not just a repetition of familiar language. They coin new terms – invented spelling, new combinations, forms of language that are not found in a dictionary that the dreamer is familiar with. How does a mind construct language which it has never heard?
The following is theorised by the theory; the subconscious, although functioning in its native language mode, can have limited access to certain information available in the conscious system. In particular, it is more easily able to read written words, and visual representations of language, as opposed to spoken words. Spoken second language words entail the type of active sequencing and articulatory control that is predominantly offline during sleep. Words, however, exist in the form of visual patterns and visual information is much more readily available to the subconscious mind.
This enables the subconscious to do a creative work: it retrieves bits of written language – incomplete spelling, morphemic elements, visual images of consciously stored words – and reinvents them into new forms. The outcome is the weird but internally consistent invented words sometimes found by dreamers.
This is also the reason why there is a known asymmetry of dreaming: people can read or see text in a dream, which is usually in a language they are only partially familiar with, but they can hardly speak a foreign language in a dream. Talking requires the dynamic structure of linguistic production. At the level of visual pattern recognition reading is much more passively available.
Prize in dream language
Based on this analysis, Images are the most common and the most intelligible -they do not need grammar, or sequence, or phonology. Written language is moderately frequent, and is drawn out of visual memory. Spoken language is least and when it is present, it tends to be fragmentary, short or in the native language.
This arrangement is determined by the availability of each form to the offline subconscious mind. The more the mode of language requires of the mind in the way of its mental effort and articulation, the less accessible is the mode when one is sleeping.
The subconscious as a creative system
One of the main implications of this theory is that the subconscious mind is not passive. It is not just a record of what it has experienced and rereads it as it sleeps. It constructs. It puts bits together to make coherent wholes, invents new combinations and creates meaning where previously there was no explicit connection in the waking life. Dreams are not disorientation; dreams are arrangement.
This is revealed by the new words that a dreamer comes across. the subconscious has borrowed fragments of visual language out of the conscious shop, and has processed it by its native linguistic logic, and has given birth to a new thing. This is creative intelligence, which functions below the awareness level.
Theoretical framing
There are a number of well-known frameworks which this theory implicitly relies on. The difference between automatic and controlled processing (a long-standing issue in cognitive psychology) is projected onto the subconscious/conscious dichotomy of this proposal. The affective salience of first language can be supported by the research on bilingual affect, which invariably demonstrates that first-language words have a greater emotional impact than their second-language counterparts. The suggestion that visual language is more subconsciously available, as compared to audio language, is in line with findings concerning implicit memory, where visual patterns can be learned and manipulated without awareness.
The contribution this theory makes is a synthesis: an integrated explanation as to why people dream in their native language, why they shift to it during times of emotional stress, why invented words are present in dreams, why fluent bilingual speech in dreams is so infrequent. These are not distinct puzzles. They are variations of the same under architecture.
Takeaway
The mind of a human being does not have a single, unified faculty of language. It is subdivided into systems with varying levels, varying modes of storage and varying modes of access. The first language is a part of the subconscious, automatic, emotional, creative and primary. Languages acquired are of the conscious mind-purposeful, systematic and logical. Dreams, emotional eruptions and the weird made words of the sleeping mind are through-glasses into this division, and here we see that language is not what we talk, but how we are constituted.
Tehreem Zahra is a researcher with a focus on linguistics. She is a member of the Linguistic Society of America.