This essay explores the affective tensions of multilingual life through the lens of Portuguese migrants in Berlin. It draws from interviews conducted between 2024 and 2025 to trace how it feels being “split” across languages, giving rise to a tentative and lived dynamic. The figure of „the migrant“ that appears throughout is neither universal nor individual; it is a phenomenological composite. A “fusion of horizons,” in the Gadamerian sense. It is, like language itself, a dialogical construct. A mesh of experiences gathered from conversations with Portuguese migrants and woven with theory, alongside my own eight years navigating Berlin’s linguistic landscape as a counterpoint. This approach tries to balance on the thin line between abstraction and particularism. It’s an attempt at using a “hermeneutic phenomenological thick description” to illuminate felt structures of linguistic displacement that transcend any single story while remaining grounded in lived specificity. It’s an attempt at resonance with those who speak in such entangled tongues.

The Ad at Samariterstraße

The advertisement glances at anyone waiting on the platform at Samariterstraße. I stood there on my first day, in what at the time was such a foreign country, glancing back at the ad. I stood puzzled by its whispered provocation: “Tired of speaking silly German?” I stood struck by its oddity; how can language make someone feel silly?

Eight years have passed since that first autumn in Berlin. Now, as a regular at the same station, the ad reveals itself, at a second glance, as an articulation of the migrant condition. I think I understand the weight of those words. I think I begin to understand how they capture something essential.

Maybe you recognise this feeling: when something remains mostly unarticulated, yet vividly felt. A peculiar burden of carrying words that never quite fit. The Portuguese migrants whom I spoke with surely felt so. Whether clinking glasses, rolling cigarettes, vigorously gesticulating, or sat close to the window of a snug café in Mitte, I was told stories of change. Stories of how the self will never return as it left. Of how the migrant leaves imprints on the trodden cobbles; and they take some too. Partially unarticulated narratives that are lived as fleeting feelings, ruptures, and metaphors.

The silliness the advertisement trades upon is not merely linguistic incompetence. It rather speaks to the embodied awareness of operating at a remove from oneself, caught in the in-betweenness so freely gifted by displacement. It tells the story of feeling inappropriate in the everyday. A story that reminds us that speaking has several levels, and that some of them are silly. That silliness presents itself as a reminder of difference; it elicits felt distance. You can learn a language, use it for practical reasons, build a life demanding it, and still, it can feel silly to speak it. It is silly how you speak it. The migrant speaks in a silly way.

Ferdinand de Saussure once differentiated between langue, the socially constructed system of conventions, and parole, the individual speech acts. While much scholarship on language and affect has focused on utterances, the migrant’s experience points to a different set of existential structures of belonging. Structures that precede and condition what can be said.

What if the migrant’s phenomenological turmoil retells stories of how langue feels? An unsettled self seeking solid ground in a shifting linguistic landscape. Ruptures revealing the split between speaking a language and feeling it. A distinction made visible through contrast-laden lenses. What, then, is the migrant’s language?

On Disembodied Words

It is said: when in Rome, do as the Romans do. A while back, as I was with my partner in the supermarket, an old lady slammed her shopping cart into a glass door we had left open. Eyes tinted with annoyance raised towards the two figures speaking in foreign tongues. Instinctively, my partner, a native German speaker, flips the situation into the immediacy of amusing banter. Never would I have been able to do as the Romans simply do.

German arrives not by choice, but by institutional imposition. To speak German in Berlin is to navigate bureaucracy, perform civic rituals, and synchronise with local rhythms. Each interaction, each encounter reinforces a feeling: it is expected of you to speak it. The stakes feel higher, marked by power differentials and a persistent awareness of foreignness.

The path towards “fluency” is a visceral one. It extends beyond vocabulary or grammar and towards a certain embodied sensitivity. The intuitive grasp of registers, tones, and cultural nuances that naturally come to the native speaker. Of course, this “native speaker”—rooted, natural, fully-at-home—is itself a fiction. Yet it is a fiction that structures the migrant’s experience of inadequacy. An idealised standard against which one’s own perceived linguistic selfhood is perpetually measured. There’s then a perennial frustration in understanding the individual words while missing the intuitive connections that make for humorous banter. The cultural references that generate warmth. The modulations signalling soundscapes of belonging. You are not from here, mutters back your own accent. There is no emotional music, only grey phonetics.

German persistently requires conscious navigation, rather than intuitive flow. Logical planning rather than spontaneity. You hear every word, “in theory,” but are acutely deaf to missing registers, tones, and nuances that would emerge naturally for native speakers. Nuance would emerge naturally to you if only you were somewhere else. I wonder whether language, just like the famous Heideggerian hammer, might not, through malfunction, draw attention to itself rather than ebbing behind habitualised use.

The migrant learns German, builds a life that demands it. Yet something remains silly in the speaking of it. A gap between functional communication and felt expression. This silliness presents itself as a persistent reminder of difference, a life bartered in uncomfortably felt change. A feeling of encountering one’s own strangeness through language. Maybe the migrant is simply not attuned. The migrant then executes German rather than feeling it—in it, through it—so as to utter disembodied words.

On Borrowed Words

Nevertheless, if it were only German that felt silly, the migrant might find some solace. It is, after all, a notoriously tricky language. But they find themselves instead caught in-between languages, watching as elements fuse, while others gently vanish.

In Berlin’s international landscape, English often becomes the pragmatic choice. The path of least resistance. At first, for some, it may feel restrictive: vocabulary as insufficient; expression as clumsy. But formal fluency quickly comes, and English soon claims most of one’s linguistic life.

Through meandering conversations, I was told how English begins to resemble a mother tongue. How it becomes dominant. One thinks in English, one dreams in it. Warm relationships nurtured through it; love met in a foreign language. It becomes the domestic language by default. English thus is not merely communicative but constitutive. It shapes the very fabric of daily experience.

Yet something remains unsettling. Something about this linguistic resettlement doesn’t “click.” English has become integral to life, and yet it never feels entirely one’s own. The tongue performs its communicative function, but something remains jarring. What about jokes, proverbs, personality? “What if,” so asked a raconteur about her own relationship, “you can never truly know your partner?” “What if,” she continued, “you can never show your truthful self in another language?”

Such is the migrant’s unarticulated paradox: English feels fluent, ever-present, even intimate; yet never truly theirs. A life threaded in “what ifs,” a voice threaded from borrowed words.

On Attrited Words

And still, a curious phenomenon reveals itself. One that occupies yet another position in this linguistic arrangement. As English takes hold, and German envelops, other languages begin to fade. Portuguese now recedes towards the occasional familial phone calls and the rare monolingual moment. For those who rarely speak it, this becomes erosion. A gradual and increasingly explicit recognition of disconnection. Tone carries a tentative longing, a sense of something slipping away; a voice is shifting. Only during brief sojourns do you hear what home should sound like.

As I was told by a storyteller: “The first love or the first great loss, all these emotions you learned in that language,” taught by those who first showed you what love is. These affective palimpsests shape how speakers inhabit their languages. Dispositions over dispositions. They create hierarchies of resonance that English, however fluent, can rarely achieve. Nonetheless, the words that once soothed childhood fears now blur into uncertain mixtures. You phrase things awkwardly. You reach for gestures when the tongue fails. This is not merely a case of convenient substitutions, rather quiet reminders of linguistic drift.

The migrant, however, disoriented in a tongue that gradually stops obeying them, sees how utterances come, but stumble. Sentences lose their rhythm. Vocabulary atrophies. Verbs themselves hinder proper communication. Sentences are clumsily formulated. Words are used that you’re not sure ever existed. What was once simply said is now translated. How absurd to struggle with one’s own mother tongue; how silly to stutter on attrited words.

Toward a Lingua Casa

If German cannot quite become one’s language, as something essential feels elusive. If English dominates daily use without ever creating engulfing attachment. And if, simultaneously, Portuguese feels increasingly unnatural to speak. This brings us once again to the question: what, then, is the migrant’s language?

I find this a trick question. It is a trick question for it invites us to essentialise what resists fixity. It is perhaps a question that resists tidy answers altogether. To speak on entangled tongues is but a consequence of living entangled lives. Ambiguity is the closest we will get.

Julia Kristeva (1991, p. 16) once wrote: “Who listens to you? At the most, you are being tolerated. Anyway, do you really want to speak?” For Kristeva, the polyglot inhabits an uneasy silence—“Thus, between two languages, your realm is silence” (p. 15). Torn from the gentleness of linguistic belonging, her reflections suggest that those who live across tongues must come to terms with living in silence itself. A remedy for an uncontrollable silliness. Cruel to speak in so many languages and not have any to call one’s own. The essayist’s laments capture something poignant; but also limiting by a pathos so liberally offered. Beyond the seductive aphorisms, and the emotive weight, there is a flattening of experience, a dramatisation of feeling. To stutter is not to be mute. That silence need not be the only outcome.

A few years back, I stumbled upon an essay from the Greek-Swedish author Theodor Kallifatides (1993). He might have a different perspective to offer. After decades of writing in Swedish while conceiving in Greek, he describes, Swedish became “a combination magnifying glass and filter” (p. 119) through which Greek experiences find expression. He crafted “a nice little lingua casa” for himself, where languages interpenetrate rather than compete. The Swedish language, he writes, made him a different Greek from the Greek he used to be.

This aptly called “lingua casa” operates as more than metaphor. It represents language as dwelling, constructed from what’s available at hand, rather than inherited as complete structure. It is not loss but transformation. It is feeling at home in (through) language. It represents language as ambiguity. It emerges from the creative tension between partial belongings. Portuguese carries childhood associations but limited contemporary vocabulary. English becomes dominant without deep cultural resonance. German promises socio-cultural integration through effort rather than intuition. Language as a home made of fragments, hesitation, and promise. A dwelling built not of fluency, but of felt meaning. A heteroglossic space, to borrow Bakhtin’s term, encompassing multiplicity within a single ambiguous self.

To speak a language is not the same as to feel in a language. There is a certain affective fluency; an embodied and habitualised grasp of a tongue that makes it valuable for a self seeking to position themselves in the world. Unlike fluency in its conventional sense, this linguistic home emerges through felt resonance rather than technical mastery. Not linguistic deficiency but an alternative form of linguistic residency, one that embraces (or is forced into) multiplicity as constitutive, rather than diminishing. To dwell in liminality itself, while finding expression in contradiction.

To think of language as such challenges essentialist assumptions of linguistic belonging. Assumptions themselves embodied in the attrited speaker, troubled over words that do not seem to fit the model. Rather than lamenting the loss of a singular “mother tongue,” it proposes multilingual subjectivity as a procreative condition; that silliness, that persistent awareness of linguistic displacement, might mark not failure but simply be a consequence of change.

This has broader implications for understanding affective belonging in increasingly mobile societies. The migrant’s experience reveals how linguistic attachment operates through layered embodied histories, cultural resonances, and institutional encounters rather than simply through communicative competence. A different path suggesting that belonging might be constructed through practice rather than inherited through birth or achieved through “assimilation” into national archetypes.

Lingua casa then is a subjectively situated and provisional form of linguistic dwelling, formed through partially (dis)resonant relations to multiple languages. It names not a language itself, but a felt heteroglossic relationality shaped by a teleological pull towards being-at-home.

. . .

The years haven’t changed it much. In that station, the same smell of stale beer, the same unknown spots on the pavements, but now familiar. That advertisement at Samariterstraße, hung on grimy walls, continues to pose its question. Weekly, I’m asked: “Tired of speaking silly German?”

But this provocation perhaps misunderstands something. That silliness is not a problem to be solved but a dimension to be inhabited. Within this silliness lies a different form of eloquence. A cartography of mingled utterances affectively mapping one’s story.

In this light, the advertisement’s provocation takes on a different meaning. That for the migrant, language, even if silly, stands perhaps not as testament to a perfect home, but of adequate shelter.

The migrant’s attempts at language offer alternative plots for contingent narratives that move beyond native versus foreign, fluent versus faulty. It counterbalances them. It presents us with language not as possession but as practice. Not bestowed but built from what’s at hand: a promethean becoming.

It would be naïve, however, to assume these tensions reside in these Portuguese migrants alone. I do not think they belong to any one group. Linguistic displacement takes many forms across many contexts. These are stories of change, after all. Though perhaps change is felt more sharply through contrast-laden lenses. But these storytellers’ everyday might offer a stepping stone, a ledge onto which one might find footing for further questioning. “The migrant” then becomes provocative heuristics, theoretical lures, invitations for resonance. These experiences are but a constellation. But they make me wonder. They make me want to ask: and you?

References

Bakhtin, M. M. (1981). The dialogic imagination (C. Emerson & M. Holquist, Trans.). University of Texas Press.

Gadamer, H.-G. (2004). Truth and method (J. Weinsheimer & D. G. Marshall, Trans.). Continuum.

Heidegger, M. (2010). Being and time (J. Stambaugh, Trans.). State University of New York Press.

Kallifatides, T. (1993). Language and identity. Harvard Review, (4), 113–120.

Kristeva, J. (1991). Strangers to ourselves (L. S. Roudiez, Trans.). Columbia University Press.

Saussure, F. de. (2020). Course in general linguistics (W. Baskin, Trans.). Columbia University Press.

Further suggested readings on the topic:

Busch, B. (2017). Expanding the notion of the linguistic repertoire: On the concept of Spracherleben—The lived experience of language. Applied Linguistics, 38(3), 340–358.

Fanon, F. (2021). The black man and language (R. Philcox, Trans.). In Black skin, white masks (pp. 1–23). Penguin Classics.

Ochs, E., & Schieffelin, B. (1989). Language has a heart. Text, 9(1), 7–26.

Pavlenko, A. (2012). Affective processing in bilingual speakers: Disembodied cognition? International Journal of Psychology, 47(6), 405–428.

Ricoeur, P. (1967). New developments in phenomenology in France: The phenomenology of language. Social Research, 34(1), 1–30.