Language and Culture

When you live in a different country and you don’t speak your mother tongue daily, you stop using a lot of words that you used to know. It doesn’t mean that you forget the words, but it means that from time to time, you stop expressing yourself like you used to; and now there are different ways to express yourself in this new language.

Besides the energy that you need to put to express yourself in English, for example. There are still many gaps from the communication, just because there are no ways for you to express exactly what you want.

That expression, in language, slangs, and encapsulating words(like saudade), is what ends up changing you for the time you are immersed in this culture.

On this day, we went to Black Writing in Portuguese event, which one of the presenters was Conceiçao Evaristo. She put this very bluntly, and it was something like this: “there are a lot of words we speak, that came from Africa, and black culture. That our grandparents use to say, but that we stopped saying it, just because of other Latin-like languages that put themselves at the ‘top’”. Which makes me think on words that used to describe feelings or situations that happened to us, that we stopped expressing; just because this other culture, in another language, didn’t have a way to express it directly. Or that it even didn’t want to talk about that.

Being empowered to understand where the words we speak come from, and why do we speak them in the way we do, is also a process to get closer to our own culture. It continues to amaze me, how I can continue to grow my passion for Brazil, from being outside of it.