I’ve been finding myself in a weird place when it comes to language lately. While renovating this website and my online presence in general, I’ve stumbled upon an issue that I have, shamefully, not given nearly enough thought to before: I have too many languages.
This isn’t a brag. I grew up in Portugal in the 90s, a very nerdy and weird kid, who started playing on her dad’s keyboard when she was two, and was very quickly exposed to English via video games, the internet, and cartoons, which were very rarely dubbed in Portugal. Result: by the time I was 11 years old, I spoke fluent English.
I’m Portuguese, born and bred, from born and bred Portuguese parents and grandparents, and while the language, culture, and habits of the country are very much alive within me, I’ve always felt I had a second nationality: that of the internet.
I once said I had been raised by the internet, with Tumblr as my mother, and MMORPGs as my father. It wasn’t just the enormous amount of time I spent on these platforms – it was how much they influenced every facet of my life, from the friends I made, to the culture I consumed, and the very way I thought. For all these life-changing experiences, the language was English.
So there I was, a Portuguese kid, speaking with her friends in English on the street because it was easier to quote memes that way, often knowing more about what was going on on the BBC than on SIC.
That created a weird disconnect, where I felt that to be online, I had to be in English. Afterall, that was the language used by all the cool artists I wanted to be like.
I wasn’t Portuguese, British, or American, I was Of The Internet.
It didn’t help that most of my equally nerdy friends in the arts did the same. After all, there are more opportunities out there than in Portugal, right?
A small part of me felt bad that I wasn’t using my language online. But it was small.
Then I moved to France, where everything is different.
Unlike in Portugal, in France, cartoons are dubbed – in fact, a lot of movies and TV shows are as well, which makes finding English fluency much rarer than it was in Portugal, but not only that, it changes the whole cultural experience. In France, opportunities aren’t out there; they’re in here.
It blew my mind how everything on TV, on the radio, and on the internet was so francophone. French people on social media, including those in the arts, write in French (this blew my mind). French people sing in French, write in French, create movies, comics, and series in French. The feeling I got in Portugal was that I needed a second language to make it. The feeling I get in France is that if I don’t speak French, I won’t make it.
So where does that leave me? Where does that leave my poor Portuguese?
One time, someone asked me: Tu n’as pas le mal du pays ?
In French, “mal du pays” translates to “homesick”, but when translated to English, literally, word by word, it sounds more like “the evil of the country”. To me, this was very funny.
There are many bad things about my country, the same way there are many bad things about every country, but the worst I’ve had of it is figuring out in which language to exist.
Chapell Roan has a beautiful line in “California”:
I stretched myself across four states
I feel like I stretched myself across three countries, and one of them only exists in “.com”, but in spite of the borders of land and language, there are people I love that I do not want to leave behind. So I write in three languages now (in French, still quite poorly).
Three essays, three versions of the same social media post, three letters from the studio. It took some gymnastics to figure out how to make it all work, but I don’t mind it. There’s a fantastic richness in knowing three languages.