Our personal relationships with languages, and the impacts of how we use language as a society.

This starts off as a love letter to multilingualism and the richness it brings, whilst also delving our complex personal relationships with the different languages we might speak - associating different languages with certain aspects of our lives, moving between them and how this is so personal and tied up in our sense of identity. The book perfectly articulated so much of what I feel about multilingualism and identity but have never quite managed to coherently explain.  Gümüşay also gets into the gate-keeping of language and the feeling that a language doesn’t “belong” to you even though it should, which strongly resonated with me though for completely different reasons. I would happily have spent the whole book on multilingualism, but it jumps into the general use of language within society, particularly to ostracise. It was both fascinating and horrifying to read how, through the clever and deliberate use of language by groups such as QAnon, public discourse has been shifted in a direction where certain fringe views have found false legitimacy in the public consciousness, consequently finding airtime in mainstream media even though such views are racist or misogynist or whatever and should have no place in public discourse. It’s something I’ve noticed but not quite understood how it’s come about. Gümüşay mainly focusses on Islamophobia, drawing on her own experiences, but most of her observations and points are applicable to any minority group. An absorbing book, which is both a love letter to multilingualism and a fascinating exploration of societal impacts of how we choose to use language more generally - highly recommend to anybody with an interest in language or languages and identity.