Status Updates From Four Words for Friend: Why ...

Living in Paris, and wrestling with the question of whether to write in Greek or French, the novelist Vassilis Alexakis observed how his Vietnamese neighbours drew the line. They spoke to each other in Vietnamese, but they spoke French to the stray cat they had adopted. It was, after all, a native.

The ability to toggle between two languages is about as near as one can get to being in two places at once. And above all, a knowledge of more than one language – even a highly unbalanced knowledge – creates an awareness that in different languages, a myriad details of the world are different. Sometimes conscious, sometimes tacit, sometimes hovering discreetly in the background, this sense of alternatives