I Don’t Worship Native Speakers
My Slovak friend recently asked me how to say “chickpeas” in Serbian. In that moment, it became painfully obvious that I had forgotten the word — just as I’ve forgotten so many others. And it isn’t only vocabulary. I lose track of grammatical expressions, syntax, idioms, the entire architecture of the language I grew up with. Anything that isn’t used daily dissolves over time.
This made me think again about how much I dislike the way people overestimate the value of a “first language” and underestimate the languages we adopt and cultivate later in life. I often hear people insist that their work must be reviewed by a “native speaker,” as if nativeness were synonymous with competence. I have always hated that expression — native speaker — because it sounds like a mystical priesthood, as if these people were born in a linguistic temple and blessed by the gods of grammar. And mother tongue is even worse: My mother never taught me the dative case. These terms suggest a kind of emotional purity that has nothing to do with how language actually works.
For me, the opposite is true: I would always rather hand my writing to someone who is sharp, attentive, ideally multilingual, than to someone whose only qualification is that English happened to be their first language. It would feel almost irresponsible if someone entrusted me with their Serbian text now — I would be the last person to catch their subtleties.
Languages don’t live in us because they were given at birth; they live in us because we use them, stretch them, inhabit them. And the ones I inhabit most deeply today are not necessarily the ones I learned first. Of course, there are small disadvantages to not having encountered a language as a baby — I will never have all the German articles in my bones, and certain English collocations will always feel slightly foreign, as if they were resting on the surface rather than rooted in the marrow. But these are minor imperfections, not failures. They are simply the traces of a linguistic life shaped by movement, choice, and experience rather than by origin.
Every tiny imperfection — the choice of the right article, a slightly awkward collocation — can easily be polished with the help of a dictionary. What cannot so easily be polished, however, is a person’s way of thinking and feeling. And this, in my view, is what truly matters. That is why the so‑called “nativeness” is not the criterion I look for in a lectorate. I look for multilinguality, emotional maturity, and intellectual competence — qualities that shape how someone reads, interprets, and understands a text. These capacities do not depend on which language was acquired first; they emerge from experience, curiosity, and the ability to inhabit more than one linguistic world.
Part of this way of thinking comes from the simple fact that I now know English and German far better than Serbian. These are the languages in which my thoughts form themselves without effort, the languages in which emotions arrive already shaped, already phrased. When I speak to myself — in moments of doubt, in moments of joy, in the quiet interior monologue that accompanies daily life — it is almost always in English or German. Serbian rarely appears there anymore; it feels like a room I once lived in but no longer furnish. This shift has taught me that linguistic belonging is not determined by origin but by habitation — by the languages we think in, feel in, and return to instinctively.
Of course, I sometimes feel a small sadness that Serbian has fallen so far behind, that a part of my linguistic past has grown quiet. Yet, I also know that this is simply the result of how my life has unfolded, how my daily world has shifted into other languages. And if I am honest, I would rather spend my time learning new languages, opening new cognitive and emotional spaces, than trying to revive or perfect a Serbian that no longer feels like the center of my life. What remains of it is tender, but it is no longer where my thinking happens, and I have made peace with that.
And when I do miss Serbian — which happens from time to time — I return to my all‑time favourite Serbian poem, Santa Maria della Salute. It reminds me of the beauty this particular language can hold, the cadence and tenderness that once shaped my sense of aesthetic feeling. Nonetheless, the encounter with the poem is different from habitual use; it is a meeting with something exquisite, not a return to a living linguistic world. It feels like visiting an old house whose rooms I no longer inhabit. I step inside, breathe its atmosphere, remember what it once meant to me (spoiler: everything) — and then step back into the languages where my life currently unfolds.
My linguistic life has followed the path of my actual life — elsewhere. The languages I inhabit now are the ones that have carried me through adulthood, through friendship, through work, through the daily negotiations of identity and belonging. Serbian remains a soft echo in the background, a language of childhood and memory, but not of daily thinking and feeling.
What I have learned from my lived experience is this: We become the languages we live in. They shape our inner landscapes far more than the ones we inherit. And I embrace that evolution not as a loss, but as a testament to the many worlds a person can learn to call home.
