Different languages for different aspects of life
I was thinking the other day about the fact that when I write poems I write them in English, even though this language is not my mother tongue. Then I though of some other "semantic fields" of my life that I have a preferred language for.
At home and with my family I usually talk in Portuguese, which is my mother tongue. This means that I have learned to refer to the objects around the house with their Portuguese name. I notice my ignorance of their names in other languages mostly when I go to someone else's house or at work, when I don't know the name of some kitchen utensil or some cleaning supply. Portuguese, for me, is mostly spoken.
Italian is the language of the country where I live. For me, it's the language of work, of social situations and of personal finances. It's also the language I use to study. I write and I speak the language often, and being similar to Portuguese, is easier to switch between the two, but is also easier to get confused and start adding suffixes of a language to words of another, creating things that don't exist in neither but are somehow still understandable.
Lastly, English is for me the language of feelings. The name of all the different changes in emotions, I know them in English; and sometimes I find it difficult to express what I feel in another language. I think the time I spent on the Internet contributed to it, but it was also the fact that I grew to love the language so much that I wanted to use it everywhere, for everything; which is something I still do to this day, although I learned to be less rigid with it. English, for me, is almost exclusively a written language; used to write poems, thoughts, lists and... this blog!