infundibulum

Here’s a lovely post on how people in exile (or just expatriates) must deal with separation from their language community: Paul Frank’s Language Jottings: Exile and language.

I sometimes feel frustrated that I’m not in Brazil, and that I can’t really live in a Portuguese-speaking environment. I love a lot of languages (too many, probably), but for whatever reason Brazilian Portuguese is the language I love most. The post refers to the fact that one can still be a part of a language community since we now have the internet, and I think it’s true that without the net I would have lost all my Portuguese long ago (I haven’t been there in ten years), but even so, I think I understand what he’s talking about to some extent, even though English is my only native language.