The seems to be a common belief that some languages are better suited to certain types of activities than others. For example, Emperor Charles V apparently said “I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men, and German to my dog.”
Some people believe that certain languages are not suitable for such things as literature, romance, poetry, pop music or stand-up comedy. Which languages they view in this way might depend on their own linguistic background, nationality and ethnicity. Such beliefs aren’t necessarily about the languages themselves but rather about the people who speak them.
In theory, every language has the same expressive potential, i.e. what you can say in one language can be said in any other language. In practise, some languages lack the vocabulary to talk about certain things, though there’s no reason why the necessary words couldn’t be coined or borrowed if people felt the need to discuss such matters. For example, in the fields of computing and related technologies, English is the dominant language. Speakers of other languages tend to borrow and/or adapt English words to talk about such things, or coin words from the native stock.
If you speak more than one language, do you use each of your languages to talk about different things or to talk to different people, like Charles V?
