It seems obvious that you write in your native language. Yet there are writers who use a different language than the one they grew up in. The motives for writing in a language other than your native language can be diverse and will be explained in this article.
Introduction
A historical work that caused a lot of controversy is: The Lion of Flanders. This novel, published in the 19th century, was written by Hendrik Conscience. To this day, this piece of literature is still popular. Yet at that time it was not so obvious to have a work published in the language of the oppressed majority, given that the French-speaking elite still looked down on the Flemish in that period. But it was precisely from this group that Conscience emerged. He was raised in French and, for ideological reasons, wrote his novel in Flemish, the Belgian variant of Dutch. Flemish literature owes a lot to this writer. In Antwerp, where he has his final resting place at the Schoonselhof, there is a square named after him, over which his statue still watches.
Economic utility of second language
As the above example shows, there are plenty of writers who use a second language. Nowadays, secondary school students also learn to write essays in English, French and possibly German. This can be useful for a later career. Our world is getting smaller and many companies need multilingual workers, especially in administration.
Many people write professional texts in another language. This often concerns international trade correspondence. In many countries people do not speak Dutch, but they do speak English, French, Spanish, Chinese, Swahili and so on. Many of these countries are also bilingual. In the Third World this is often a consequence of former colonization. That is why in many countries they know English, French, Spanish or Portuguese.
The big advantage of commonly used languages is that many people know them, even if it is as a second language. An example: a company in the Netherlands wants to do business with a company in India. India has many languages and dialects that an average Dutch person does not know. But given that India was once an English colony and the vast majority of educated Indians also know English, which an average Dutch person learns at school, there is a common language. Both parties then correspond in two languages, but save the costs and effort of an interpreter.
Commercial correspondence is often written in the second language of the person handling it. Many people therefore have to send letters and emails in other languages every day. There are also writers who write in their second language to have a larger audience. If you consult articles on English-language online libraries such as InfoNu.nl, you will notice that there are many active writers with exotic names.
Emotional reasons
The internet has made our world smaller and people are also starting to build international friendships in their spare time. Do you remember the days of pen pals? That still exists, but nowadays people rarely have to wait long for a letter from far away, because they can also chat live with each other. There are already international love affairs thanks to the Internet.
Sometimes one can also express oneself better in another language, as an artistic expression. For example, many songs are written in English, because it is often more melodious and can be distributed on a larger scale. One can also write in a language that is not commercially interesting, but to make a point. Consider the example of Conscience in the introduction. There are also activists who sometimes write in minority languages, which are sometimes not read by the large majority of speakers. An example of this is Romanesque, the language of the Roma, who are sometimes also called Gypsies. Romanesque is the spoken second language for many Roma. Most Roma read and write the national language of the country where they grow up, but Romanesque remains a spoken language, which most people do not read and in which only an eccentric person writes. So
there are languages that do not have a writing culture. Berber is also an example of a spoken language. In Morocco you see Arabic and French everywhere, but the Berber languages have only recently been phonetically recorded on paper. So anyone who puts such a spoken language on paper usually does so for ideological reasons and there is no other motive behind this than the love for this language. The desire to preserve it is also an important argument, because many spoken languages have become second languages and have to compete with those of the dominant population group.
Disadvantages of writing in a second language
The only disadvantage of writing in two languages is that the writer has to be doubly concentrated, especially if he or she has to apply different spelling and grammar rules, or even a different script. The chance of making mistakes is slightly greater. Or if you have written in a second language for a long time, you can sometimes encounter problems when you have to write in your own language again.
The more languages you know, the more languages you can make mistakes in. Some companies require perfect trilingualism. Since no one uses their own language perfectly, one may wonder whether that is realistic. It is indeed economically more convenient to have to pay just one person instead of two or three for the same work. In many cases, multilingualism is an economic factor for greater profit. This also applies, for example, to writers who write in English, French or Spanish as a second language to reach a larger audience.
It can sometimes also be less interesting economically. So it goes without saying that few people will read a collection of poetry in Berber or Romanesque. Or people go through the pressure of constantly changing languages, make more stupid mistakes and deliver less quality work, which is also not economically interesting.
One can therefore conclude that bilingualism certainly has many advantages, but because every language is unique and no one masters it perfectly, it can sometimes also lead to an overall poorer use of language.