There’s a Language Barrier Between Me and My Parents
I don’t know what my first language is
My parents are total polyglots. This has always impressed me.
n. Polyglot: one who speaks and reads multiple different languages.
Before they moved to Canada, my mom and dad spent over 20 years in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which is located in Central Africa. Thanks to dear King Leopold II (former king of Belgium and thankfully fucking dead), DR Congo’s official language is French. Despite this, my parents each speak at least three.
Congo’s, like, huge and largely rural. Which languages you speak depend on where you live. While there are over 200 indigenous ones spoken in the country, I spent my childhood hearing about three:
- Lingala, the most widely spoken of the indigenous languages. I don’t speak a lick of it, so it’s also the language my parents talked shit about us in! :D
- Tshiluba, which my parents spoke more fluently at some point, but started losing over time after immigrating to Canada. I’ve never been sure how much of it they retained, but sometimes it would come out when family friends came over. When I was super young, it sounded kind of similar to Lingala.
- Swahili. Congo-Swahili, to be specific. My mom was completely fluent before she moved to Canada. She never stopped understanding it, but says she isn’t as good of a speaker anymore.
- Russian. I know I said three, but that’s just Congolese languages. Before Canada, my parents briefly lived in Russia, where my dad learned Russian (he was going to be a pilot…a story for another time). He’s of course lost a lot of it over time, but this still blows my mind.
Growing up, my home was a melting pot of languages. My mom and aunt were always gossiping in Lingala, but switched easily into French whenever we needed their attention. My three siblings and I largely speak to each other in English, even though we all went to French school growing up. We also preferred English channels over the French ones, though our TV had both options. Sometimes, during our birthdays, we’d sing the Happy Birthday song twice: once in French, another in Russian, just so my dad could flex. My oldest sister is the only one of us who can understand Lingala. Despite my parents’ efforts, though, she refuses to speak it.
I have a hard time telling people what my first language is because of all this. It’s most likely French because of my parents, but the only language I can remember never understanding is Lingala.
Over time, though, things in my home changed. My siblings and I started going to school, my dad moved back to DR Congo, we moved and moved and moved. We got older and moodier and less chatty. At some point, without any of us really noticing, we stopped understanding each other. Things have been very hard since.
It all starts at school, doesn’t it?
French Teachers are Really Annoying
I studied in the French First Language system in Canada, Ontario from K-12. Canada’s official languages are English and French, but the vast majority of citizens outside of Quebec are not efficiently taught French in anglophone schools.
Any and everyone even a little bit interested in learning French must understand this: it’s such a slippery language. Growing up in the Canadian French school system meant having every member of the school personnel from the principal to the janitor reiterating some version of this:
En français, les amis!
I’m not even joking when I tell you they were strict. There was a real and hard rule that we could not speak to each other in English. Obviously, this only made English that much cooler to us.
C’mon. Every TV show, movie, celebrity, and non-school peer ever spoke or was in English. The English school kids called us “the Frenchies.” Many, many students were the only member of their family who spoke French, anyway. As soon as they got home, it was back to English or Arabic or Creole. French was very much just the language we had to write our assignments in, for most of us.
Every time our teachers reminded us to switch back to French, they punctuated the point by fear mongering the day we’d wake up unable to speak any of it anymore. I’ve spent my entire life rolling my eyes at this. I had to keep up appearances, of course. But secretly, especially as my home got quieter, I was deathly afraid they’d be proven right.
This fear grew legs and was sprinting by the time I started uni. My mom had been gone for years at that point, and we were not speaking.
My first time going to English school :D
I can safely say that my teachers were right, but not in the way I expected.
They weren’t talking out of their asses. French is absolutely not a sticky language, especially if you’re not in a French-speaking region.
I’ve been losing and regaining my French over the past 6 years. While I initially had a French minor, I dropped it in favour of a creative writing one, instead. Though my French suffered, I don’t regret this. I wouldn’t have been able to switch majors last year otherwise.
I’m currently taking a linguistics course as part of my creative writing degree. Last week, we learned something that finally, finally explained why my French sounds just like it always has in my head, but absolutely fucking stupid when I speak it out loud.
Linguistically speaking, French and English are completely different sound systems from each other. What this means is, it’s not your fault that you say “déjà vu” and “laissez-faire”…like that. Your mouth literally can’t make the right sounds because they don’t exist in English. It’s also why French people say “zat” instead of “that.” The ‘th’ sound doesn’t exist in French. We pronounce it the same way you would the letter T.
The differences between these languages never mattered to my French school peers and I growing up. We switched between both as necessary and super easily. Some expressions are better put in English, and others in French. When everyone around you speaks both, you never need to choose. This is where Frenglish/Franglais comes in.
But these differences matter a lot between my parents and I. Sometimes it occurs to me that in a literal sense, my parents and I are not speaking the same language. I like to say that these days, when I do speak French, I’m actually just speaking English sentences with French words. When calling my mom, I find myself unable to finish my thought embarrassingly often. The French way to say the English thing I’m thinking of doesn’t come to mind fast enough, the conversation lags…
Sometimes it comes to me. Others, I give up, say it in English, and cross my fingers it’s the parts my mom is familiar with. Rarely, my mom will gently supply the word or phrase I’m looking for.
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This was humiliating at first. I still remember when speaking to her in French was like breathing. But your own French is always “still good enough” until one day you look back and realize it’s not at all what it used to be.
But the only way to get it back is to speak it horribly anyway and as often as you can. Now that I know this, I welcome her attempts to help. I’ve even gotten better at just asking her for the word instead of pretending I still know.
My mom is a mom, though, and an African one at that. She’s gotten really good at protecting my feelings (shoutout becoming an adult, lol), but I can’t shake the fear that secretly, she still can’t understand a word I’m saying.
My parents have gotten really good at pretending to know what I’m saying :/
It’s important to know that my grandmother has a stutter, which is probably where I got mine (I’m good at hiding it). My mom’s mom, I mean. Anyone with a speech impediment knows how thin people’s patience can be. When the person with the impediment is your mom, though, you don’t get to be impatient. You have to figure out how to communicate with her.
My mom figured out that as long as she catches the beginning and the end of my grandmother’s sentence, she can get the gist of her message. In other words, just because she’s nodding, replying, and even understanding you, it doesn’t mean you’re actually speaking clearly.
To circle back to linguistics (I’m keeping it so simple for you guys), every speaker has two things:
- Linguistic competence, which is everything you subconsciously know about the language you speak (you don’t have a running list of every English word you know, do you?) A simpler way to think of it is as your “mental grammar.”
- Linguistic performance, which sounds like what it is. Despite (subconsciously) knowing a lot about your language, you probably still find yourself stuttering, using filler words, losing track of your point, forgetting the word you were thinking of, etc.
I bring this up because, when I’m practicing it alone, I will eventually realize that my French isn’t as bad as I thought. This is because I feel more confident without an audience. My mental French grammar is more than likely perfectly intact, just like any one else’s. My linguistics course helped me realize I’ve been blaming linguistic competence for what’s really been an issue of linguistic performance all along .
For a long time, I thought I had to reteach myself French like a first-time learner would. Duolingo and dictations and children’s books. Now that I know what I didn’t know about language before (the essence of linguistics), I have direction as to how I can “regain” my French.
n. Linguistics: simply put, the study of the things you know but don’t know you know about language.
The Artist’s Way taught me that sometimes people are creatively blocked. Could it be possible I’m similarly linguistically blocked? That, for some reason, the real issue’s that I’m not practicing the right behaviours to strengthen my linguistic performance where I have the power to?
I’ve only ever used French for school. I still don’t think of it as cool or sexy like everybody else does. English, to me, was the language of the world. Art and social media and my closest friends have always “made more sense” in English. I write so well in it I study it, but don’t often write much in French at all.
If all of this is true, it sounds like all I need to do is expand my definition of the world. Why not just consume more French art? Why not let myself write fiction in French? Why not start getting really into French shows beyond just Miraculous Ladybug and SKAM France season 3 (this is my Heated Rivalry)?
If speaking to my parents in French was like breathing at some point, “losing” my French has been like breathing manually. It sucks and I can’t wait to stop thinking about it. But I have to try first. It won’t be next week, but eventually, it’ll be like I never lost it. One day, talking to my mom and getting to know my dad will re-become automatic.
Fin!
Thanks for reading and see you next month! :)
— Muanza
Originally published at https://muanzasmusings.substack.com on September 30, 2026.
Sources & Works Cited
- Polyglot (Cambridge Dictionary)
- Democratic Republic of the Congo (Wikipedia)
- Leopold II: King of Belgium (Britannica)
- Lingala language (Brittanica)
- Tshiluba language (Brittanica)
- Congo-Swahili (Wikipedia)
- I Haven’t Seen My Mom Since I Was 15 by Muanza’s Musings
- I’m Western University’s First Creative Writing Student by Muanza’s Musings
- Linguistic competence (Wikipedia)
- Linguistic performance (Wikipedia)
- Linguistics (Merriam-Webster)
- How The Artist’s Way Healed My Relationship With God by Muanza’s Musings
- SKAM France (Serializd)
- Miraculous Ladybug: Tales of Ladybug & Cat Noir (Serializd)
