Buffalo Sabres defenseman Rasmus Dahlin had just finished his press scrum following the NHL All-Star Game in Toronto last month, amiably and eloquently holding court for several minutes in English about the second half of the season, what it’s like to play alongside Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl, the physical toll of playing two three-on-three games with an hourlong break in between, the return of NHL players to the Olympics, and various other notebook-filling topics lobbed at him by reporters.
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But as the scrum dissipated, Dahlin didn’t get up off his chair. He knew a second wave was coming. And as a handful of Swedish reporters descended on the dais, Dahlin politely held his hand up.
“Hang on, give me a sec,” he said. “I need to reset my brain.”
After just a moment, Dahlin answered questions in Swedish for the next several minutes.
For a monolingual individual, it’s a marvel to behold someone so casually and comfortably speaking in multiple languages. And the courage it takes for a professional athlete to conduct a recorded interview in a second or third language — especially one in which they’re not entirely fluent — shouldn’t be overlooked.
But the NHL is a global sport, with 19 countries represented this season alone. Whether you’re dropped into a new country as a teenager or have someone from another country dropped into your locker room, being able to speak more than one language isn’t a luxury, it can be a necessity.
Whether you’re listening to a penalty-kill breakdown in the video room or listening for a teammate while fighting for a puck in the corner, there’s precious little time to translate in your head, no time for a reset. Whatever language you’re hearing, whatever language you’re speaking, whatever language you’re thinking, it has to come instantly.
So how do they do it? How does something so difficult for some come so naturally for others?
“You just find a way,” said Chicago forward Philipp Kurashev, who speaks fluent English, Russian and German. “You really don’t have a choice.”
It’s a strange question that nobody is ready for: What language do you think in?
“Whoa,” said the Colorado Avalanche’s Artturi Lehkonen, who speaks Finnish, Swedish and English.
“Huh. Wow,” said the Seattle Kraken’s Pierre-Edouard Bellemare, who speaks French, Swedish and English.
“That’s a hard question to answer,” said the Dallas Stars’ Evgenii Dadonov, a native Russian speaker.
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“Weird; it’s not something I ever really considered,” said Colorado’s Frederik Olofsson, a Sweden native who moved to the United States at the age of 16.
An NHL game is like a meeting of the United Nations, with shouts and yelps and profanities and trash talk in several languages constantly pinballing around the rink. And while a player has time to “reset” his brain between press scrums, the game happens at breathtaking speed — there’s often no time to think, just time to react.
And you never know what’ll come out of your mouth.
“I remember when I was in Dallas, we had a defenseman, Nils Lundkvist,” Olofsson said. “There were times when we’re in a battle in the corner and as a center, you’re calling for pucks. And for some reason, you spit out Swedish. I don’t know how to really explain it. I think our brains have just gotten used to flipping back and forth.”
He’s not wrong. Well, not entirely. The brain is indeed like a muscle, in that the more work it gets, the stronger it gets. Viorica Marian, a professor of linguistics at Northwestern University with a focus on multilingualism, said that speaking multiple languages helps stave off dementia and Alzheimer’s disease the way exercise helps the body stave off various physical ailments.
But it’s not about switching back and forth, or “resetting”’ the brain. It’s more like flipping between web browser tabs.
“That’s not really how the brain works,” Marian said. “That’s a very common misconception among people, that you switch languages — that you turn one off and turn the other one on. We now know the brain doesn’t ever really switch off the other languages. They’re constantly running in the background. Their threshold of activation is not as high, but we have very clear evidence that the brain has to work very hard because you have to inhibit competition from those languages. Even though they’re not activated as highly, they’re still activated. So the brain has to make sure the wrong language doesn’t pop out.”
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That might explain why so many multilingual speakers mix and match their languages. The Finns call it “Finglish.” The Swedes call it “Swinglish.” And so on.
“I think in Russian, mostly, but some words are just easier in English,” Blackhawks defenseman Nikita Zaitsev said. “So even at home, I’ll use them while I’m speaking mostly Russian. It looks stupid, but it works.”
“I kind of catch myself sometimes because some words I use in English way more often than I’d use them in Russian — and I can’t even remember how to say them in Russian,” Dadonov said. “If I’m home talking to my wife, it’s like, whatever comes to mind quicker, you just say that. It doesn’t matter which language it is.”
Buffalo winger Zemgus Girgensons has been in the United States for half of his 30-year-old life. His wife is American. His kids are American. His life is American. With only two other Latvians in the NHL this season, the only time he really speaks Latvian is when he’s talking to his family back home.
But every now and then, the Latvian part of his brain is activated. Sometimes when he least expects it.
“My thoughts definitely are American,” he said. “But there are times when I’ll just have Latvian things pop through my head. I’ll speak to myself in Latvian and then I’ll transfer back to English. It’s definitely odd when that’s happening.”
English is hockey’s universal language. Put a Russian and a Quebecois in a locker room together, and they’re likely to talk to each other in English. But Swedish players will speak to each other in Swedish. Czech players will talk to each other in Czech. So even on the ice, in the heat of the moment, players are constantly alternating tongues.
Before a faceoff, if Olofsson has a Swedish linemate, he might hash out a plan in Swedish before communicating that plan to the rest of his teammates in English. It’s not done to be sneaky or secretive, and there’s nothing strategic about it. It just happens naturally. See Swede, speak Swedish.
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“In Dallas, we had a Finnish ‘D’ pair in Esa Lindell and Jani Hakanpää,” Olofsson said. “I’d be lining up for a faceoff in the O-zone and they’re just yelling at each other in Finnish. I’m just hoping they’re not changing the play we’re running here.”
Colorado’s Yakov Trenin said he thinks only in Russian, but when he’s on the ice, only English ever comes out. He can’t explain it; it just sort of happens that way.
“I’m just like, ‘Pass! Pass! Open! Open!,’” he said. “Then I get back to the bench, I’m thinking about the last shift in Russian. Just how my brain works, I guess.”
The ease with which NHL players seem to pick up English — and usable bits of other languages — is remarkable. Artemi Panarin came to Chicago from Russia in 2015 not really knowing a lick of English. By midseason, he was able to communicate with his teammates. By the following season, he was able to carry on a conversation. He’s been regularly doing interviews in English for years now. Yes, he took some online English classes in Russia before making the move, but really, his English education — like so many others in the hockey world — happened in the locker room, at the grocery store and on Netflix.
True immersion is the fastest way to learn a language and the most direct path to fluency. When you get dropped into a new locker room in a new country, the brain has no choice but to keep up.
“When you first get here, you’re slow with the English,” Lehkonen said. “But after a while, it just comes naturally. Also, English is kind of easy because you hear it on TV and movies all the time.”
Finns and Swedes are taught English in grade school (Finns are also taught Swedish — “We’ve got long days in school, that’s for sure,” Lehkonen joked), and the brain is more receptive to learning languages at an early age. They’re taught British English in school, but because of America’s pop-culture dominance, they tend to arrive in North America with a good sense of American lingo and a good understanding of American accents.
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It’s much harder for, say, Russians, Czechs and Slovaks, who often aren’t brought up around English at all.
But it’s one thing to speak another language. It’s another thing to think in another language.
“I usually think in Finnish, but it kind of depends on the day a little bit,” Colorado’s Mikko Rantanen said. “When we didn’t have any Finns on the team, I’d think in English because it’d just be easier to get it out there. But when I play with (Lehkonen), I still think in Finnish because I can talk to him in Finnish.”
Of course, there are multilingual people in all walks of life, people who can conduct business meetings in multiple languages, shop in multiple languages, read in multiple languages, write music and poetry in multiple languages. But are elite athletes uniquely hard-wired for the task?
Marian, the linguistics professor, said the field of bilingualism is still in its nascent stages, and there hasn’t been much research on multilingual athletes. But she said it’s a potentially fascinating group to study.
“When you’re functioning at that high level of performance and have that level of reaction time and cognitive abilities, your brain becomes very sharp in many ways,” Marian said. “It’s not going to be sharp in every single way — if you’re a great athlete, it doesn’t mean you’ll be a brilliant mathematician. But you do see those benefits translate to other cognitive activities. Athletes who speak multiple languages are likely to be a really remarkable population of research because they have high performance in their physical exercise but also high performance in their mental exercise.”
Ah, but these are thoughts for curious academics and envious monolinguals to ponder. For those in the cacophonous cauldron of the NHL, where maybe a dozen languages are rattling around the boards and intermingling and merging into new hybrid creations on any given night, it’s just the way life sounds.
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Because really, between the whistles, there’s usually no time to think, anyway — in any language.
“When you’re out there, you’re just thinking hockey,” Olofsson said. “You spit out whatever comes out first. Whatever works to get the puck to you.”
(Illustration: Sean Reilly / The Athletic; Photos: Bruce Bennett, Joe Sargent / Getty Images)
