A data essay on identity, language and displacement
Where are you from?
It takes most people half a second. They name a city and move on. For the person who has lived in four countries, the question is a small trap. You open your mouth and have to decide which version of the answer they want. The long one or the polite one. You watch their eyes and give them the polite one.
As a child, when the question came, the answer that felt most honest was one I never gave out loud. A boat. International waters. Belonging to no one, claimed by no flag. It was not a fantasy of escape. It was the only geography that made sense – the one place where not being from anywhere was not a problem to explain.
There are roughly 281 million international migrants in the world today, about 3.6% of the global population. Most of them decided to go. I decided nothing. The moving happened above my head – countries, cities, schools, arriving the way weather arrives.
You stop being from a place. You start being from a story that takes too long to tell at parties.
This is not a piece about suffering. It is about what happens to a person assembled in pieces, across different cities and different languages. And what happens later, when that person is the one holding the decisions.
The language I did not choose
Fragment 01 · Romanian · It was my father's language. It should be primal, deep, mine. I cannot express anger in it. Perhaps because he refused me first.
One summer my brother and I were sent back to Romania for a month. While we were away, my mother moved our entire life to another city. We came back to a different street, a different room, our things already unpacked by someone else. Nobody had done anything wrong. It was practical. It was probably easier that way.
I learned early that home was something other people could move.
Language is not a communication tool. It is a memory system, an emotional register, the way you are funny. When you shift the dominant language of your daily life, the others do not disappear. They start to live at a slight remove, like relatives you call less often, who eventually stop expecting you to call at all.
Attrition accelerates in languages used only at home, in childhood, or for nostalgia. The professional vocabulary goes first.
Linguists call it attrition. The gradual erosion of a language through disuse. It does not happen all at once. First you lose the word for a specific shade of feeling. Then idioms go. Then you find yourself thinking in your new language and translating backwards into your mother tongue, instead of the other way around.
Heritage language retention by generation
Three generations. That is how long it takes for a living language to become an heirloom. Nobody decides to let it go. It just goes.
Except sometimes somebody does decide. Romanian survived in me. My children do not speak it. That was not attrition. That was a choice I made.
I can't remember which language my mother first spoke to me. Probably Romanian. But as she learned more, the languages at home evolved. Romanian then Greek. Then more Greek than Romanian. Eventually English, then more English than Greek.
The languages did not replace one another cleanly. They accumulated, then shifted in weight. Today I switch between Spanish and English, and it happens without hesitation. Sometimes a greek word jumps in, other times, a Romanian one.
Years later I went back. The land is beautiful. The people are warm, a bit too warm for what I had become used to. I walked around waiting for the click of recognition, the ground holding me differently. It did not come. The place is my mother’s land. Not mine. A tourist in my own origin.
Memory arrives in pieces
Most of my childhood actually happened in Cyprus. Greek is not ancestral. It is simply where I was.
I do not have a continuous childhood. When I try to remember it I do not get a timeline. I get a room. A smell. The particular light on a wall in the late afternoon. Avgolemono at midnight. A voice without the sentence it belonged to. The sea, constantly, in the background of everything.
Some of it has become less reachable as I have got older, not more. I am not going to explain why. I only want to record that this is the shape it takes.
Fragment 02 · Greek · They knew I spoke Greek only when i started speaking. It wasn't joy. It was surprise. Was it the language? Was it me?
Poor old man
yearns for home
but he can’t go.
No he can’t go home,
home where the heart is.
And he comes to me
to tell me his pain.
Because he knows,
that I know
that he isn’t happy.
He wants his Ithaki,
and he keeps telling me
whilst I look him in the eye
and I pretend,
and he knows that I,
don’t get it.
But he can’t figure out why,
he can’t see that I,
never had a home.
Reading the room
English arrived through school and books and never announced itself.
It became the language of everything I chose: education, work, design, argument, the version of myself I can explain most precisely. It is the language I think in when I am thinking hardest.
Fragment 04 · English
The other thing it gave me was legibility. Growing up between cultures teaches you to read a room quickly – what is expected, which register works, which version of you will be easiest for the people in front of you. From the outside it looks like social ease. It is a skill built from never having been able to take a room for granted.
It is a real strength. I would not give it back.
But if you become very good at understanding what a room requires from you, it takes longer to notice what you require from the room.
Research in bilingual cognition suggests that people who switch between languages have measurably different emotional responses depending on which one is active. The same memory can carry different weight in different tongues. Saying ‘I love you’ in a language you learned as an adult feels less exposed than saying it in the language you cried in as a child.
The language I walked into
Spanish is the only one I arrived at as an adult, on purpose.
A taxi driver asked the other day where I was from. He had heard me speak English, so he asked in English. Then I gave him my address and replied in Spanish. He smiled. Said: wow. Perfect Spanish. A small thing. But it opened something.
In Cyprus the same had happened in reverse – people would approach in English, or with the hesitation of someone unsure how much of their language you hold. Then I would answer in Greek and their eyes would light up. There are over a billion English speakers in the world. The best connections were never made in English. They were made in the language the other person did not expect me to speak.
Spain felt strange at first. Familiar in some register I could not name, but not mine either. So you start building anchors. A favourite coffee shop. A viewpoint you return to. A morning ritual. A particular street that asks nothing of you. Small things, but they were fragments of myself I had kept across all the moves, and here they found somewhere to land.
Fragment 03 · Spanish · At first I was ashamed. Then it became mine. The warmest period until now. Is it the language? Is it me?
And then the position reverses.
I have two children. Which means I am now one of the adults deciding where somebody else’s childhood will happen. Which language is spoken at breakfast. Which grandparents they will be able to understand. Which road they walk to school. Which sea becomes so ordinary they barely notice it.
Every one of those decisions looks small on the day it is made. None of them are.
The strongest predictor of whether a heritage language survives is not classes or apps. It is use. Somebody has to keep speaking it.
Research on bilingual children is hopeful – more flexible thinking, a stronger grasp that other people hold different beliefs from their own. Not because bilingualism is magic. Because holding two systems at once teaches you that systems are not universal.
They will pause before answering where they are from. I know exactly what that pause is. I gave it to them.
The map you carry
No cure for having lived in multiple places. No way to un-become the person that crossing made you. The languages are in there. The memories are in there – fragments, flashbacks, all the pieces of yourself you have had to house in borrowed rooms. You are a palimpsest.
I grew up beside the sea without noticing it. It was just there, ordinary, part of the backdrop. It took leaving, and moving, and landing somewhere else entirely to understand what it had been giving me. Cyprus had it. Spain has it. Countries changed. Languages changed. Homes changed. Versions of me changed. You came home to it. Not to a country.
What if belonging is not a place at all. What if it is a state of mind – and if you did not grow up inside it, then it is a foreign state, one you have to reach by other means. Piece by piece. The coffee shop. The viewpoint. The morning. The sea.
I cannot go back and choose the cities. I did not choose the leaving, or the arriving, or which language was in the room when I learned to be afraid. But I am the one holding the decisions now, and that is a different position entirely.
The question was never going to have a clean answer. What changed is that I finally understood what I had been asking.
In the end, you get to decide.
Sources – UN International Migration Report 2022 · Pollock & Van Reken, Third Culture Kids (2017) · Köpke & Schmid, Language Attrition (2004) · Bialystok, Bilingualism: The Language and Mind (2001) · Fail, Thompson & Walker, TCK identity research (2004) · Fishman, diaspora language retention (1991) · Harris, emotional processing in L1/L2 (2004)
About
Alina is a product designer based in Málaga, Spain. She has lived in four countries, speaks four languages, and is raising bilingual children. She writes poetry and works on creative projects.