I’ve never even tried to hide the fact that I’m not a native English speaker.
I’m Scandinavian, born and bread.
The descendant of Vikings and one Polish horse thief. (We know he was a horse thief because he got caught and ended up in court records.)
Though, thankfully, I don’t have any of the local accents when I speak English, just a very nondescript pan-European one.
Native English speakers are always quick to point out, “But your English is so good!” and Americans especially like to ask me where in the States I went to school.
Answer: I didn’t.
I’ve never even been to America.
I’m functionally trilingual, but officially bilingual.
My mother, back when she was in nursing school, struggled to read a lot of the English medical books, texts and papers they had to study.
She decided that no child of her would struggle as she had, and plopped me in front of the TV as a toddler to learn English from Sally & Sam, Sesame Street, Cartoon Network and TNT.
And it worked; I was fluent in English by the time I started studying it as my first foreign language in third grade.
In fact, whether or not my non-native Englishness shows in my writing should be the least of my worries.
I’ve studied English for so long, that I know I have a good handle on the language.
It’s the language I think in.
It’s the language I most easily express myself in.
It’s the language in which I have the largest and most easily accessible vocabulary.
Being a sort of in-betweener, both culturally and linguistically speaking, I never found it as easy to express myself or my thinking in either native language as it was in a neutral third.
I’ve even worked exclusively in English for well over a decade.
And I know that having this fear is irrational, but that doesn’t stop it from being so.
I even know that I have much bigger problems to worry about: the pacing of the book, the narrative being a little all over the place (it’s my first full-length novel, after all), the character development etc.
Yet, here I find myself freaking out about being outed as a non-native English speaker through my prose.
Something in my multilingual heart just finds that utterly terrifying.
Want to get more out of reading books?
Grab this FREE guide on how to start a reading journal, complete with review templates, reading trackers and bingo sheets.
Understand yourself better as a reader, engage more with the books you read & make space for creative self-expression. Get it now!
“When Sasha Barrett gets bitten by a snake on a mission, her squad captain’s quick actions not only save her life, but also make her realise something she may have known all along…“
