The In-Betweens

Bilingualism confronts us with the problem of travel: of all that there is and remains in the distances we travel from one point to another, from one language to another. But the journey that bilingualism implies for us is not a mere going back and forth between two or more

languages. Distance is travelled simultaneously in the languages we inhabit. We travel between, and in, languages.

Any bilingual person knows that they are not exactly the same person in all the languages they speak. It is not so much that we are different in each language we speak, but that the world does not happen to us in the same way in all languages. Each language is the world it

names; the world becomes the grammars that express it.

And we are there: in the distances that remain between two grammars; in what cannot be said in either of them,…