Prologue

Write a piece about your experience as a multilingual, I was asked. A personal piece, then. Maybe not as belaboured an enterprise as producing a scientific thesis on one of the many facets of multilingualism, but infinitely more intimidating. A baring of the soul of sorts, because the history of one’s languages is essentially one’s own history, and personal histories are intimate. Yet my story cannot be a factual chronology of my life as a polyglot, of my meanderings across political and linguistic borders. The relationship I have to my languages is too visceral for precise dates, precise geographies, precise events. There will be no exact whens, whys and hows. I can only tell an emic tale.