Growing up multilingual: a story of identity
Written by Natasha Ghesquiere
Hi, my name is Natasha Camille Ghesquiere. I am twenty-four years old and I am from… Well, I never actually know what to answer. It depends on the time of day, the place you ask me, where you are from and whether or not I like you. So, why don’t I just tell you my story and let you decide?
I was born in Singapore to two Belgian parents who had lived there for a decade. Then, at the ripe age of one, we all moved to Paris, France, where I would spend the next thirteen years of my life. During that time, I became proficient in eating croissants, judging others and complaining about the weather. Just after my fourteenth birthday, we moved to the USA. For four incredible years, I got to be a California girl (though I never quite learned how to surf). After four years of sunshine, I missed the rain and cold too much and ended up doing my bachelor’s in Oregon. I now live in the Netherlands, where I am finishing my master’s in linguistics (and consuming a concerning amount of bitterballen). Somewhere along the way, I also spent time living in Argentina, Chile and Ireland. Each place I have lived has taught me new ways to eat, cry and laugh.
Somehow, throughout all my travels, I never lived in Belgium. Not because I didn’t want to, but because I never really had the opportunity. I have the passport and an intense pride in our football team during the World Cup (Spain’s winning goal in the quarter-final was pure luck), but that is pretty much it. So I’m not really from Belgium, but I’m also not really from anywhere else. My mother likes to say I am a child of the world, but I have always felt like that sounded a bit pretentious.
What is my mother tongue?
Okay, let’s try a different strategy. What is my mother tongue, and what languages do I speak? Maybe we can narrow it down that way.
Both of my parents speak French as their mother tongue, and I grew up speaking French at home and around town. But apart from three years, all of my schooling was done in English. I have always considered myself bilingual, although these two languages occupy very different parts of my life. French carries my cultural heritage and connects me to my family, whereas English is my professional language and what I speak with most of my friends. Which language I consider my “first language” fluctuates with time and my surroundings.
When I talk about linguistic heritage, however, things get even more complicated. My grandparents all had different mother tongues: French, Walloon, Flemish and Swedish. Somehow, French became dominant across the family, although those other linguistic connections never disappeared. So when my sister tentatively announced she was going to learn Swedish, my grandmother jumped at the opportunity, sending her links to all kinds of Swedish websites and books and repeatedly asking to practise with her before she had even started classes. Safe to say, multilingualism is embedded in my family.
As I grew up, at school, instead of learning any language with an obvious family connection, I decided to learn Spanish. I am now fluent, and it has allowed me to travel, form friendships and meet people I would never have been able to otherwise. I was introduced to empanadas and all the different ways of saying “a straw” and loved every second of it.
Where am I from?
Okay, we’re getting off track again. So, where am I from?
I have mostly come to terms with the idea that I am from nowhere and everywhere. I have picked up pieces of every culture I have lived in. Multilingualism in my family is not the exception, it is the norm. Not one of my cousins speaks exactly the same combination of languages (this makes gossiping at family reunions quite fun).
I love languages, and languages seem to love me back. That is why I chose to pursue a bachelor’s degree in anthropology and then a master’s in linguistics. I am fascinated by how language shapes culture, relationships and community, particularly what happens when different languages are brought together and how this changes people’s experiences.
Language might just be the most powerful tool humankind has ever created (yes, even more than fire). We use it to communicate, form community, express and understand who we are. Yet multilingualism is still often treated as something that needs to be carefully managed. In education, languages tend to be separated into neat categories: the language of the institution, the language being taught and, somewhere outside the classroom, all the other languages children happen to speak.
I believe in a more inclusive approach to language use. Different languages do not have to compete; they can work alongside one another and create broader ways of understanding culture and community. To me, language should not only be taught through grammar and literature. It should also be lived. This is what brought me to Mother Tongues.
My experience with mother tongues
Mother Tongues is an organisation focused on promoting multilingualism through creative and community-based projects. One of these projects is Language Explorers, a multilingual arts programme for young children and their families. No single language is imposed, and there are no traditional “classes about language”. Instead, workshops use creativity and art while encouraging family connection and allowing all languages into the space.
When I first learnt about these workshops, I was immediately brought back to my own childhood. My mother tried her best to teach us language and heritage, but at some point everything becomes easier when you have support. I remember attending French language workshops and hating them because I could not understand why I needed “extra school”. The only workshops I remember fondly were the ones centred around culture and dance. I could simply exist in the language and culture, letting them surround me without being asked to do anything with them.
So when I found out Mother Tongues offered workshops that approached multilingualism through creativity, I immediately wanted to work with them. Personally, I wanted to understand how multilingual education could be fun and successful rather than something children or families experienced as a chore. So, I applied for an internship at Mother Tongues.
Luckily, I was accepted and invited to conduct research [read more about it here]. The dream had come true. My aim was to analyse how families used and interacted with language during the workshops. At first, I imagined myself as some kind of linguistic spy, peering slightly too closely at families through an obnoxiously large handheld telescope while collecting highly secret information about multilingual children.
However, what I quickly discovered was that a simple introduction and a couple of questions worked just as well, if not better. Almost every family I spoke to seemed genuinely interested in my research. Some offered their perspectives before I could even ask. People were not only happy to talk about their family and their multilingual journey, but excited to do so. The artists were equally generous with their time, explaining how they understood the relationship between creativity and language and how their work could become a tool for inclusion. Through these activities, children could participate however they wanted, strengthening their relationships with language and family while developing their personal artistic flair.
One of my personal curiosities was what made a multilingual workshop like Language Explorers different from a bilingual or language-specific one. I thought I would find the answer in language. Logical, right? If I wanted to understand why language mattered, surely I needed to watch people use it. But fairly quickly, I realised that some of the most interesting moments were the ones where nobody seemed particularly concerned with language at all.
A space where families can simply exist
My biggest and most unexpected takeaway was the value of a space where families could simply exist. In these workshops, multilingualism and multiculturalism of all kinds were normal. No child or family needed to defend their experience or explain why they spoke the languages they did.
I remember my very first workshop. The artist was talking about seeds, asking each child what kind of seed they were holding and how to say its name in their language. Everything was going wonderfully. The children were excitedly calling out different words in all kinds of languages. That is, until we reached an avocado seed. The child holding it spoke Irish. They proudly lifted the seed, then suddenly frowned when they realised they did not know the Irish word for avocado. They turned to their parent, whose face immediately contorted like they had just been asked to jump into a pit of snakes. Tentatively, the parent admitted they did not know either and asked for a second to Google it.
At that, the other parents started laughing. Everyone seemed all too familiar with the panic of being asked for a vocabulary word by your own child and having absolutely no idea. Another Irish parent quickly came to the family’s rescue with a joke. There was no way Irish could have a word for avocado, they said, when even their grandmother had not known what an avocado was. The whole workshop laughed and the artist redirected the activity and moved on. But the moment stayed with me.
Nobody treated the missing word as a failure. Nobody questioned whether the family was “Irish enough” or sufficiently proficient. Instead, uncertainty became something everyone could recognise and laugh about together. The families and workshop coordinators had created a space where not knowing was okay. The workshop did not build confidence by pretending everyone knew everything. It built confidence by making it safe not to know.
That moment reshaped how I understood the value of the workshops. I had arrived looking for successful language use, but sometimes the strongest sense of community appeared precisely when perfect language use broke down. The experience changed how I observe and what I pay attention to in my future research. I began the internship focused on visible language use, but left paying much more attention to the space around it: who feels comfortable speaking, who is allowed not to know, how people participate without words and how creativity makes that participation possible.
For one day a week, families could come together and spend time with their children, speaking however many or few languages they wanted. Everyone was different, and that difference became ordinary in that space.
The workshops did not only affect the children. Conversations with parents showed me how valuable it could be for adults to share their own uncertainties around multilingualism. Raising a multilingual child brings unique challenges: parents forget words, children mix up languages or randomly decide to go on strike (my poor mother had to bribe my sister with pain au chocolat to start speaking French to her at home). Plans about who will speak what to whom do not always survive contact with real life.
Languages everywhere
I was also lucky enough to attend the Mother Tongues Festival 2026, which was by far one of my favourite days of the year. For two days, families from everywhere and nowhere came together to celebrate who they were, what they spoke and how their differences brought them together.
Walking through the halls between workshops, you could hear languages everywhere. Children spoke to their families as they moved between activities and people shared spaces without everyone needing to sound the same. What struck me most was not simply the number of languages present, but how unremarkable that diversity seemed inside the festival. Nobody needed to stop and explain why they belonged there.
Certain workshops were language-specific, while others were more broadly multilingual. They all connected language, art and nature. Children were encouraged to speak, sing and perform. Families who had previously met reunited and new families were introduced to the community. Parents who did not speak a language in common sat next to each other watching their children play together. During a dance workshop held in Spanish, I remember talking to a child and discovering that she did not speak any Spanish (I had been talking to her for a good minute before she admitted she had no clue what I was saying). She was simply there to dance. Not speaking Spanish did not bother her at all. Instead, she was able to join in and have fun like everyone else. It did not make her any less part of the workshop. She belonged as much as any other child.
Throughout all of it, inclusion, joy and excitement reverberated around the building. That feeling extended beyond the festival. I found it in the artists, volunteers and staff members I met throughout my internship, many of whom understood first-hand the complications, joys and occasional absurdities of multilingual life.
Multilingual heritage is not a question to solve
As I am sure you are all very familiar with my multilingual journey by now, I will not repeat the extent to which I have been surrounded by languages. But these workshops did something in two months that I had not managed to do for myself in twenty-three years. They helped me understand that my multilingual heritage was not a question I needed to solve. For most of my life, I have been difficult to categorise. I do not fit neatly into one, two or even three boxes. Who I am feels more like a precarious stack of boxes, leaning ever so slightly too far to one side for comfort. Are they going to fall? What happens if they do?
Honestly, the stress is exhilarating, and at this point I am just along for the ride.
Mother Tongues did not suddenly give me a simple answer to the question “Where are you from?” It did something better. It showed me a space where complicated answers were normal and where sometimes no answer was required at all. As I graduate and continue my career in multilingualism, I want to keep exploring language not only through fluency, grammar or proficiency, but through all the social connections and small moments in between.
I now take pride in my languages not because of how fluent I am or how convincing my accent might be, but because of the ways they have shaped the person I am. You do not need to speak a language perfectly to share it with others, nor do you need to justify your interest. You can learn a language simply because you want to. You can forget words, mix languages, make mistakes and still claim a relationship with them.
So, let me introduce myself one last time.
Hi, my name is Natasha Camille Ghesquiere. I speak French, English, Spanish and Dutch (when I need to order my bitterballen). I am from Belgium, but then again, not really. And I love that about me.
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