I had a boyfriend who spoke several languages. I stopped counting them at six and broke up with him. How can anyone be so annoyingly brilliant?
I’m joking, that’s not why our story ended. I’m not jealous of anyone’s language skills because I know that every language someone speaks has a story in it that most people would be uncomfortable reading.
My view of languages reflects my Eastern European upbringing, where speaking more than one language is the exception rather than the norm. However, in many parts of the world, speaking as many as six languages is not unusual, and there is little recognition of the special mindset this requires.
Different ethnic groups live and do business side by side and the only way to co-exist is to master each other’s languages. Displacement due to conflicts, wars, and environmental disasters is also a major contributor to the need to speak one or more additional languages. In the latter case, it’s a basic need without which one would not survive in one’s new environment, all too often as a child.
Is your language better than mine?
Because of its significance in business, English is often said to be the most important language in the world. Although it is the language with the most speakers in 2024, all languages are equally important. They belong to communities and individuals, and to say that this or that language is more important than another is to promote a highly discriminatory narrative. Language is deeply personal and cultural. It reflects emotions, authenticity, and ideas, it can connect and inspire. It’s a window into our innermost world.
It’s a little known fact that English is only at the third place when we count the number of native users. Mandarin Chinese and Spanish are ahead of English in this respect. The prominence of English in terms of the number of its speakers is due to its colonial history.
Language variants
Accents, dialects, and the simplification of officially accepted grammar rules are sometimes ridiculed but the criticisms usually come from monolingual groups who are unaware of the complexities and requirements of speaking a foreign language. Because of the number of speakers, this is most striking in the case of English, where the mockery seems endless.
Through colonialism, the British Empire set in motion a cultural change that affected belief systems and languages, imposing new religions and ways of life on entire continents. The new ‘subjects’ had to learn the language of the colonisers, and to this day many people look down on regional language varieties.
Fortunately, there are strong and firm voices that appreciate the efforts of those who are brave enough to enter the world of a foreign culture, however flawed their first or later steps. Language experts also do invaluable work, not only drawing attention to endangered languages, but also showing how and why the languages of the former colonisers had been changed and enriched profoundly by the vocabulary, grammar, and culture of the oppressed.
My story
I had no particular reason to focus on English in secondary school. I had a drive that seemed to lack a foundation, a purpose, and a goal in my mind. I even failed an end-of-year exam, but my academic results didn’t bother me, I kept studying. My first private tutors were young women who had previously worked as nannies in the United States and they instilled in me grammatical forms that I still use today. Even my education in England has not been able to overwrite the knowledge I gained as a teenager. However, I know that in most situations I am expected to be consistent in my use of language.
Whatever instincts drove me in those early years, English at university became indispensable. It became a tool to access the cultures I was learning about, but there was no literature available in my mother tongue.
The first English speakers I came into contact with outside school were Africans, and a few years later Asians. Their accents didn’t affect mine, but I became accustomed to a kind of simplified language that I lazily call international English, a broad term that refers to the international use of English, rather than a single language variety. In this case, the only aim is to get information from A to B.
Expectations increased as I entered the UK education system. I delivered what was expected of me, but my previous experience of the language remains and is still noticeable today. This means that my experiences continue to influence how I express myself, shaping my accent, my vocabulary choices, and even the way I construct sentences. The languages I speak reflect the challenges of navigating between different linguistic and cultural environments and are a unique reflection of my life so far.
Love
While English was a tool for me to get to know the world, academically speaking, Spanish was what my heart and soul longed for. When I started learning it, someone wisely told me: ’You will love who you are in Spanish.’ And so I did. I’m far from fluent, and I am not sure I ever will be. I’m quite entertaining in Spanish at the moment. It’s enough to try to put together a short sentence to embarrass myself and make the audience laugh, but my aim is not to be fluent yet. I want to enjoy the encounters that this language makes possible. The encounters with myself and the strangers I meet on the road. Whether at home, abroad, or on the Internet.
I was first introduced to Spanish by a certain Colombian who liked to spice up his English with Spanish phrases that I was expected to understand. I didn’t. That moment didn’t inspire me to learn the language, it was too brief or rather meaningless to have an impact, but someone else, much later, did.
I’m not here to talk about lost connections, but love plays a significant role in language learning and deserves more attention. If we were more open about it, we would hear some of the most beautiful, heartbreaking, and inspiring stories, all of which are worthy of a novel.
People who learn languages try to practise their chosen language in real-life situations. They participate in cultural events, consciously make new contacts and, of course, travel, because the desire to use our new knowledge draws us to foreign countries. Understanding, or at least accepting, new ways of thinking is often a huge challenge, but we are happy to face it. And sometimes, as is inevitable among humans, we fall in love.
Whether it happens in our hometown with a best friend we grew up and share the same language with, or we spend two weeks with someone in the Gobi, never seeing them again, love has the same qualities everywhere. It can be uplifting, soul-crushing, joyful, sad, or messy, and sometimes all of these at the same time. Neither the length of the relationship nor the nationality of the people involved makes any difference in this respect. Lasting a lifetime or a week, such encounters can be extremely intense experiences that reveal more about ourselves than anything else. And whatever the end, what greater gift could there be from another human being than a key to a new world?
But before you rush off thinking I’ve revealed the secret to fairy-tale romance and start downloading international dating apps, hang on with me for a few more minutes. Magic happens while you are out in the wild, rarely in front of a screen, and most of the relationships built through language are not romantic. They are human-to-human interactions, including the beautiful, the ugly, and the ordinary moments.
However, if you decide to enter a multilingual relationship, you should know that it requires a high level of cultural sensitivity, acceptance that you see the world from more than just your own perspective, openness, and above all respect. And presence. All you have is the present moment, expecting more tends to turn things sour. Even when one last time you hug the parting stranger before dawn at a distant airport who brought you back to life and taught you to smile again, you are grateful for what has happened instead of weeping for what you know will never be. And even with the best of intentions, differences between cultures are sometimes too great to grasp, and the judgment of well-wishers and unsolicited bits of advice are no help in overcoming obstacles.
In the end
Learning and speaking a language is much more than building a rich vocabulary or perfecting grammar. It’s about opening doors to hearts, cultures, and parts of yourself you never knew existed. It’s about connections that go beyond words, whether fleeting or lifelong, romantic or platonic.
Language discloses the universality of our emotions and shows that if we seek to understand each others’ words, superficial differences can become a source of inspiration rather than a cause for fear.
So no, your language is not better than mine. It’s your life and not mine, that’s all.