Between Two Languages: When Home Is a Feeling, Not a Place
Between Two Languages: When Home Is a Feeling, Not a Place
The Quiet Corner | FS Psychotherapy
There is a word in Welsh, hiraeth, that has no direct equivalent in English. It is usually translated as a kind of longing, a homesickness for something that may never have existed, or that can never be returned to. A grief for a lost home, a lost time, a lost version of yourself. It is a feeling many bilingual and multilingual people recognise immediately, even if they have never encountered the word before.
The fact that some languages have words for experiences that others don’t is not a coincidence. It reflects the way language and emotional life are intertwined, how the words available to us shape what we are able to feel, express, and understand about ourselves. And for people who live between languages, this intertwining can become one of the most quietly significant aspects of their inner life.
The Language You Reach For
Most bilingual people have a language they reach for in moments of intensity. The language of a childhood argument. The language of a lullaby. The language that comes most naturally when you stub your toe, receive unexpected news, or try to say something that really matters.
For many people who have spent years living in a second language, this primary emotional language remains the first one learned, the one in which the earliest experiences were encoded, the one in which the self was first formed. Even for those who are fluent and at ease in their second language, there can be a quality to the first language that the second simply doesn’t replicate, a directness, a warmth, an access to something interior that feels harder to reach in translation.
This is not a limitation to be overcome. It is something worth understanding, and worth making room for.
When You Begin to Lose a Language
One of the less talked about experiences of long-term emigration is the gradual erosion of the first language. It tends to happen slowly and almost imperceptibly. The vocabulary narrows slightly. The grammar becomes less instinctive. You reach for a word in your mother tongue and find, with a small shock, that the word that comes is in your second language instead.
For some people this feels like freedom, a natural evolution, a sign of how fully they have made their new life their own. For others it produces something closer to grief, a sense of losing a part of themselves that they didn’t choose to let go of, of becoming slightly less themselves in the language that once felt most fully theirs.
Neither response is wrong. But the grief response, in particular, is one that deserves to be taken seriously rather than dismissed as nostalgia or sentimentality.
Home as a Feeling
For people who have lived between languages and cultures for long enough, the idea of home as a fixed geographical place often becomes complicated. Home starts to feel less like a location and more like a feeling, one that can be found, partially and temporarily, in different places and different contexts, and that is never quite complete anywhere.
It might be found in speaking your first language with someone who shares it. In a particular food, a particular piece of music, a particular quality of light that reminds you of somewhere else. In a conversation with someone who understands both the worlds you move between, who doesn’t require you to choose or to explain.
This kind of belonging, partial and plural and portable, is not a consolation prize for the loss of a simpler, more rooted sense of home. It is its own thing, with its own texture and its own value. But it can also be its own source of longing, a permanent awareness of what is present and what is absent simultaneously.
The Self That Lives Between
Living between languages means, in some sense, living between selves. Not in a fragmented or pathological way, but in the way of someone who has more than one way of being in the world, more than one register of emotional expression, more than one set of cultural instincts to draw on.
This multiplicity is a richness. It is also, at times, a complexity. The question of which self is the real one, or whether that question even makes sense, is one that many multilingual people find themselves returning to, particularly at moments of transition, loss, or significant change.
Therapy can offer a space to explore that question without needing to resolve it. To sit with the multiplicity, to honour what each language and each cultural self carries, and to find a way of holding it all that feels coherent and liveable rather than fragmenting.
A Space for All of You
In my practice, I work with clients in English and Italian, and I hold a deep interest in the interior experience of bilingual and multilingual life. Not just the practicalities of which language to work in, but the more fundamental questions of how language shapes emotional experience, how the self is constituted differently across languages, and what it means to try to be known, fully known, across that difference.
If you are bilingual or multilingual and have ever felt that something of your experience doesn’t quite translate, I’d warmly invite you to get in touch for a free 20-minute consultation. A gentle, no-obligation conversation to see whether working together might feel right.
Federica Savoré is a BACP Accredited psychotherapist and COSCA Practitioner offering counselling, supervision and training in Aberdeen and online across the UK. To get in touch, visit [fspsychotherapy.com/contact-me](https://fspsychotherapy.com/contact-me).
