One of my greatest fears in life, for as long as I can remember, has been to be mistaken for an American on any given holiday. My luggage will be packed at the very last minute, yes—but safely tucked into the front pocket of my backpack will be a few sentences in the local tongue. I will fumble at the counter anyway. I will forget verbs. I will remember the insults best. But I will have tried. And that matters to me.

Duolingo (the apple of my eye, my 160-day streak is going strong, thank you for asking) has seen many eras of my life: Spanish from middle school, Chinese because I feel a deep, unshakable shame that I write like a toddler in Mandarin, Gaeilge (Irish Gaelic), and High Valyrian, which we will not be discussing further. In Mandarin, love sounds like a French person in pain. The pinyin for “us” is women. Languages, some you don’t even know yet, sometimes, know exactly what you mean. I don’t know what I mean half the time. 

I collect scraps. From books, from films, from old interviews. Du hast schöne Augen (German for you have beautiful eyes)which I learned from an old Ferrari F1 interview with Charles Leclerc and Sebastian Vettel. A handful of Brazilian Portuguese insults from the TV series Dom. I also know pelada principalmente, which means “especially naked.” I don’t know when I’ll need it, but its time will come I’m sure. Languages are like that.

Latin and Ancient Greek are treated with a reverence we rarely afford other “dead” languages, largely because they’re tied to a fantasy of the cradle of European knowledge. But every language carries knowledge. And when a language disappears, something irretrievable goes with it.

English likes to present itself as neutral. A global tool. A practical compromise. But no language that arrives on the back of empire is ever neutral. English is convenient precisely because it has been violently normalised. Its dominance is not organic—it is infrastructural. It is the language of airports, contracts, academic legitimacy, and digital space. Writing in English often feels like choosing clarity over fidelity. You gain reach, but you lose texture. Certain emotions flatten. Certain concepts become explainable only by approximation. Fluency, in this sense, is not mastery it is negotiation.

There are words that refuse translation—not because translators lack skill, but because the cultures that produced them needed a precision others never bothered to develop.

Saudade is often described as longing, but that’s an understatement. It is the ache of absence mixed with gratitude for having felt something at all. A nostalgia that isn’t sweet but heavy, almost physical. Saudade holds loss and love in the same breath: the presence of what is no longer there, and the knowledge that you were changed by it.

Toska, in Russian, is darker. Nabokov described it as a sensation of spiritual anguish, a longing without object, a sadness without clear cause. It’s not sadness for something specific, it’s the dull, persistent sense that something essential is missing, even if you can’t name what. Toska is existential. It doesn’t want to be fixed. It just wants to be acknowledged.

Aonarán: a person who is wholly content in their own company. Not lonely. Not isolated. Simply complete without an audience. It suggests that solitude is not a deficit but a state of balance.

The German Fernweh translates literally to “far-sickness,” a homesickness for somewhere you’ve never been. It’s the pull of imagined places, of alternate lives, of futures that exist only as sensation. Fernweh isn’t about travel as consumption, it’s about the quiet grief of knowing you won’t live every version of yourself. It’s yearning for distance itself.

Then there is komorebi, the Japanese word for sunlight filtering through the leaves of trees. Not sunlight. Not trees. Not shade. The relationship between them. A fleeting moment that exists only because of movement, light, and patience. Komorebi names the beauty of things that can’t be held, only noticed.

The Spanish sobremesa captures what happens after the plates are cleared but no one gets up. The conversation that deepens once hunger has been satisfied. Time that isn’t productive, scheduled, or efficient—but meaningful. Sobremesa recognises that connection doesn’t happen on the clock. It happens when we allow moments to stretch.

The Swedish mångata describes the moon’s reflection on water. The shimmering path of light that seems almost solid, yet disappears the moment you try to touch it. It’s a word for beauty that is visible but unreachable. For illusions that aren’t lies,  reminders that not everything can be possessed.

And then there is 缘分 (yuanfen)—often flattened into “fate,” but that translation strips it of its tenderness. Yuanfen describes a destined connection between people, shaped by timing, circumstance, and unseen threads. It doesn’t promise permanence. It explains why some people arrive briefly and leave profoundly. Why some encounters change you without staying. In yuanfen, duration is irrelevant. Meaning is not measured by longevity. Some meetings last a lifetime. Others last an afternoon, a season, a sentence. That is not a failure of connection. It is its design. The value is not in holding on, but in having met at all.

學一種語言,就是多一扇看世界的窗。
To learn a language is to have one more window from which
to look at the world.

Language does not merely describe reality. It shapes it culturally.

Which is why translation has always been political. Biblical translation debates make this painfully clear. Control the language, and you control the narrative. One Hebrew word can spawn a dozen English interpretations, each shaped by the political climate of the time. Eve was not created as Adam’s “helper” in the submissive sense we were taught. The original word, ezer, means something closer to a powerful rescuer. Tsela does not mean “rib,” but a structural support—often used to describe the side of a temple. Eve was not made from something expendable; she was made from what holds a structure upright. Depending on interpretation, she may have been Adam’s entire side. An equal.

Similarly, we are told to “fear” God, when the word used is yirah, meaning awe, reverence, profound respect. Hesychia, often weaponised to silence women, refers not to enforced quietness but to tranquility, stillness, peace in prayer—a state encouraged in both men and women at the time.

Translation errors are not neutral. They sediment power.

“There is nothing more devastating than permanently losing a language. When you talk about a dead language, when you talk about assimilation that is one hundred percent effective; when you force a culture to assimilate and they lose the last remaining bits of their culture it is truly dead forever. And that sends a chill down my spine, that we are able to inflict such horror, where we forget (…). Those things are more important than ever.”

—Brittany Broski, on her Broski Report podcast, discussing Hozier’s Butchered Tongue

Assimilation has always been a control tactic. Historically, it was the language of the court that mattered—the language of justice, administration, education. Access to power required linguistic submission. That problem hasn’t disappeared. Look at modern courts, tribunals, bureaucracies. Even when you technically speak the language, the way law is written often excludes comprehension. Can everyone pick up the constitution of the country they live in and fully grasp every concept it contains? And if not—who does democracy actually serve?

When a language dies, so does a specific way of being alive. What remains is translation—and translation, no matter how careful, is always a compromise.

Ireland knows this well. The Irish language revival is deeply political. And paradoxically, tools like Duolingo—flawed as they are—do help. Gaeilge on an app does not guarantee fluency, but it lowers the barrier. It signals that the language belongs in the present.

“Tír gan teanga, tír gan anam.”
A country without a language is a country without a soul.

People who speak multiple languages often perceive the world through layered lenses. Their sense of self shifts with context. Emotional expression changes depending on the language used (look at me conveniently writing this in English, Ha!) .

At the current rate, more than half of the world’s languages will be extinct by the end of this century. Indigenous peoples make up less than six percent of the global population, yet they speak over four thousand languages. That is not accidental loss. That is history repeating itself. There is a reason why so many communities across the world share this exact wound.

“The number one on the to-do list of colonialism is to wipe out a people’s language. Because it takes away their identity. It takes away their meaning, their connection to the land, connection to the place they come from and then that’s a people that you can conquer, you can tax them, you can degrade them; make them feel like their language isn’t any use, it’s not the way forward, it’s not progressive.”

—Móglaí Bap, Kneecap

Monolingualism often comes with a particular kind of certainty. If you only inhabit one linguistic structure, it is easier to believe that your way of naming things is the way things are. Multilingualism destabilises that illusion early. You learn that objects change gender. That emotions refuse equivalence. That syntax carries values. You learn that misunderstanding is not failure—it is the default. And that humility is not optional when meaning depends on context.

There is also a violence in what is not passed down. Many people grow up knowing their parents chose not to teach them their first language—not out of malice, but out of fear. Fear of discrimination. Fear of making life harder. Fear that fluency would cost assimilation. That loss often registers later, as absence rather than pain. A sense that something should be there, but isn’t. Language inheritance is never just personal: it is shaped by policy, schooling, and social punishment. Forgetting is rarely a free choice.

People often ask me what language I think in. Or dream in. The answer is disappointing: it’s messy. Inconsistent. Mandarin is reserved almost exclusively for gossip—with my mother, with a few chosen friends. It’s the language I sound youngest in. Not just because my vocabulary is limited, but because it’s the first one I learned. The one my blurriest memories live in.

Most of my life happens in French, though English is where I sound the most articulate—because it’s what I read in, what I’m taught in, what I write in. But I don’t believe in assigning one language to one part of myself. After 5pm on a bad day, I speak all three regardless of who my interlocutor is or what languages they understand. That’s no longer my problem.

I do wonder, sometimes, whether people who only know one of my languages only ever get access to one portion of me. Not that I’m incomplete without all three—but that language fragments the self. And that’s okay. Perfection in any language is a myth. Never trust celebrities who claim they “speak” a language because they can fumble through a greeting. By that metric, I speak all the languages in the world.

Because without language, there is no memory. Without memory, no accountability. And without accountability, power runs completely unchecked.

A world without linguistic care is one that forgets how to listen. The real threat of this coexistence of languages, if it were to be encouraged, is that it slows things down. It resists simplification. And it reminds us that no single voice—no matter how dominant—can contain the whole story.

Read More