Living in Three Languages

“I can think of my life as an array of relations to languages, those that surrounded me as a background, those I refused to learn, those I badly wanted to learn, those I studied professionally, those –the intimate ones- I think in, write in, am funny in, work in. Sometimes I catch myself envying intensely those monolinguals that were born, grew up, have lived all their adult life in one language. I miss the feeling of comfort, of certainty, of control I imagine they have, unaware as they usually are that it could be otherwise.”

Living in Three Languages
Colette Grinevald (en Bybee, Haiman y Thompson, 1997).