My spouse and I are both bilingual but we fell in love in English, and now that we have kids we're trying to create a trilingual household and discovering that we don't really know each other's humor, anger, or tenderness in our heritage languages. We're all learning together but sometimes it feels like we're becoming strangers to each other in the most intimate spaces.
More people experience this than they realize.
Creating multilingual intimacy requires renegotiating emotional connection across languages that hold different versions of the self.
“Where Are You with Language and identity — what your first language holds?”
If this sounds familiar, the Library can help you find the bigger picture.