"jonathan ellis" blog posts

How to be both...

From an early age my now 7-year-old son has been practising how to answer the familiar question: where do you come from? Growing up bilingual in Sheffield where this question frequently doubles as a query about national identity, his first tactic was to reply according to the language in which the question was posed. If you asked him whether he was English or Spanish in English, he would always be English. Try the same question in Spanish and, perhaps not surprisingly, he would suddenly be Spanish. (Woody Allen’s Zelig acts similarly, changing his accent and appearance depending on who he is with.) As my son got older, probably around 4 or 5, he preferred to be both. “I’m English and Spanish,” he would affirm, the stress always landing on that conjunction.

Posted on: 21 February 2017