At the beginning of this month, I had "officially" started doing my summer work, this had been a very interesting experience, to say the least, as while my relatives are just enjoying down time, I am forcing myself to do work, knowing that I am doomed in either way. Nevertheless, I will persevere because I had started reading two self-help type of books which had highly motivated me ; 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens by Sean Covey and Le Chemin Le Moins Fréquenté by Scott Peck (translated in French from his original book; Road Less Traveled), and I highly recommend reading both by the way.
Anyways back to the point, during my stay in Tunisia that has been for the totality of the summer, I had realised that I was truly linguistically confused. How so you may ask? Well, my trilingual self was showing, not subtly but rather as if it had been written on my forehead since at this point I cannot speak for two minutes without subconsciously mixing three languages. Don't get me wrong, I love being trilingual, but the issues with languages are that when you neglect one, you give too much power to the other, causing you to have a hegemony in the way you speak, and a confused grandma that doesn't understand a word you say.
Nevertheless, I am not the only one in my family to have this struggle. Ameni, my older sister, keeps speaking English whilst we walk the roads of a rural city, and I keep insisting she speaks French or Arabic because I don't want to come out as being a tourist, only to have her start speaking English again a few minutes later. Or my parents keep asking for take away at restaurants when it's actually à emporter. I'm always a stranger wherever I go since in Tunisia I do not speak totality the dialect (which itself is a mix of Tunisian and French, and the ratio varies where you are) and anywhere else I am not a native.
My brain thinks in French when I am writing in English and thinking in English when writing in French, and Arabic I guess had always been at the bottom. I do not speak any of these languages perfectly and I cannot have one as a focal point. By the end of grade 11, my French had regressed due to my lack of practice, but now I guess it's been back again, as I force myself to speak French with my cousins. It's funny because you would expect that the more languages you speak, the less you need google translate but in reality, it's always a tab that is open, because of those troubles in memory of remembering what the word is in another language.
My cousins have a similar struggle as when they go back to school they adopt the strange Yesmine Jargon. I will leave you the benefit of the doubt to what this could be.
