Thinking without words: lessons from a multilingual life
The child of parents from two different countries living in a third, I was born into a home where languages intertwined and carried with them a sense of warmth and familiarity. That early experience of language as something that brought people together shifted abruptly when I was seven and we moved to the United States. I didn’t speak a word of English beyond fumbling through “head, shoulders, knees, and toes”, and overnight, language transformed from a source of connection into a barrier....