By Olivia Singier
After fifteen years of living in Australia and the United States, I began to notice something entirely unexpected: my French was quietly changing. Not disappearing, nothing so dramatic, but shifting in ways that were subtle enough to miss at first, and strange enough to stop me in my tracks once I did notice. A word I had used my whole life would suddenly sit just out of reach. An expression I grew up with would feel slightly off when I finally retrieved it. And new phrases would appear in my speech that felt neither fully French nor fully English, but something in between.
The first time it really struck me was when I couldn’t immediately find the French word for « un journal de bord » during a conversation with my best friend about my weekend plans. Such an ordinary word! Despite having taught for fifteen years in France, the term just wouldn’t come. I knew exactly what I meant – a notebook where I plan my lessons and organize my week but, for a moment, “planbook” came to me faster than my own language’s word. It was a small thing, but it unsettled me at the time.
What I’ve come to understand is that this isn’t simply about time spent away. It’s about which language your brain is working hardest in at any given moment. Living in the United States, Australia before that, means thinking in English, negotiating in English, making jokes in English, and the brain, efficient as it is, starts routing more traffic that way. French doesn’t disappear; it just gets used less frequently, and retrieval slows. So now I will sometimes hesitate between « PV » and “ticket” when I angrily text my son about his traffic ticket. I may find myself saying « faire du sens » instead of the correct « avoir du sens », a direct import from “to make sense” that has taken up residence in my French without asking permission.
The mixing is the part I find most fascinating to observe in myself. It rarely feels like a choice, it happens mid-sentence, almost automatically. I’ll be speaking French on the phone with a friend and catch myself saying « Je n’ai pas checké mes messages, mais je n’ai pas scrollé », « checker » and « scroller » being Anglicized verbs that have somehow become more natural than « vérifier » or « faire défiler » . I don’t notice it until I hear myself. And even then, the hybrid sentence felt right in the moment, which is perhaps the most revealing thing of all.
What makes this stranger still is that it persists even when French is theoretically available. I have French friends in San Francisco. I work in an American school and have a French colleague that I meet with every day to have coffee; yet, we default to English almost immediately, even for French sensitive topics such as Paris Saint Germain and Olympique de Marseille rival soccer teams. This chance to switch back should feel like a relief but instead we carry on in the language of the city around us, as if English has become the social default that neither of us thinks to question. We don’t discuss it. We just do it.
I’ve started to wonder whether the language you use most shapes not just how you speak, but how you process. Perhaps I am, in some measurable way, slightly different in each language? And yet none of this feels like loss. It feels more like a rewiring, one that is ongoing, and that I’ve stopped trying to resist. The French I speak today is not the French I spoke when I left. It has English running through it. But it is still mine. And when I go back home, or pick up a novel, or fall into a long conversation with my mom, the words come back as if they had simply been waiting.
Living between two languages is disorienting in ways that are difficult to explain to someone who hasn’t felt it. But it is also, I’ve found, a way of understanding how language actually works: not as something fixed and inherited, but as something living, responsive, and shaped by everything around it.