Multiple language acquisition: ‘Damn it, why cant i keep these two languages apart?’

This paper addresses the following question: in multiple language acquisition, what principles exist in the mixing and merging of interlanguages? It is our premise that difficulties that learners have in keeping languages and interlanguages apart is an interesting and important topic, both for multiple language acquisition and, more generally, for a cognitive theory of language and mind. The data we use are primarily fragments from a five year diary study into the learning of German. We claim that there is an ‘interlanguage logic’ in multiple language acquisition, where the learner is in a cognitive mode we can call ‘talk foreign’. We end the paper with the claim that in multiple language acquisition, one can see glimpses of the structure of what Weinreich (1953) claims is the basic learning strategy in interlanguage creation: ‘interlingual identifications’.