I have always found it strange that I can be the same person and yet feel slightly different depending on the language I am speaking. It is not that my personality completely changes. I am still me. I still have the same memories, the same opinions, the same habits and the same way of looking at the world. But something shifts. My tone changes, my sense of humour changes, the words I choose change. Sometimes, even the way I think seems to change.
I grew up with two languages: Moroccan Arabic and French. Both were part of my everyday life, although in different ways and often intertwined. Moroccan Arabic was the language of family conversations, jokes, spontaneous reactions and expressions that simply feel like home. French was just as present. I used it with family, at school, with friends and in many of the ordinary moments of growing up. Switching between the two was never something I consciously thought about. It was simply part of how I communicated.
Then there was Modern Standard Arabic. It occupied a different place in my life. I mainly encountered it through school, books, formal writing and education. It was familiar, but it was not the Arabic I naturally spoke at home. There was something almost strange about learning a more structured version of a language that already felt so familiar to me through Darija. I could move between the two, but they belonged to very different worlds.
English came into my life later, and somewhat differently from the other languages I grew up with. I learned it with the awareness that it would be useful for my future, particularly in a world that was becoming increasingly international and connected. Unlike French and Moroccan Arabic, which were simply part of my everyday life from childhood, English was a language I consciously chose to develop. Over time, it became part of my education, my interests and the way I interacted with people and ideas from different parts of the world. It never replaced the languages I already had; it simply added another dimension to them. Perhaps because I learned it with a sense of purpose, English still carries a slightly different feeling for me: it reminds me of the person I was preparing to become, rather than the person I already was.
And then there is Portuguese. Portuguese is probably the language in which I have changed the most. I arrived in Portugal at 19 and started learning the language some months before that. Still, learning the language has been happening mostly at the same time as I was learning how to live away from home. Portuguese became attached to an entirely new chapter of my life: university, Lisbon, independence, getting lost, making mistakes, meeting people, dealing with bureaucracy, ordering coffee and having conversations that I would never have imagined having a few years earlier.
Maybe that is why learning a language is never just about learning vocabulary. Every language comes with a world attached to it. It carries certain ways of being polite, joking, showing affection, disagreeing, apologizing and expressing emotions. Some languages make you sound softer. Others make you sound more direct. Some seem better suited to certain thoughts than others. Sometimes there is an expression in one language that feels impossible to reproduce in another without losing something along the way.
And because of that, each language seems to reveal a slightly different version of you. There are moments when I switch languages during a conversation and suddenly notice a change in myself. I might become more playful in one language, more serious in another, more confident in another. Sometimes I even find myself searching for a word that I know perfectly well, except that I know it in the “wrong” language.
It makes me wonder which version is the real me.
But perhaps that is the wrong question. Maybe none of these versions is more authentic than the others. Maybe we are not one fixed person hiding behind different languages. Maybe we are made up of all these versions at once.
The person I am with my family is not exactly the person I am with my friends. The person I was at sixteen is not exactly the person I am at twenty-two. The person I am in Fes is not exactly the person I am in Lisbon. And the person I am in Portuguese is not exactly the person I am in Arabic, French or English. Yet all of them are me.
There is something beautiful about that. Languages do not simply give us different ways of saying the same things. Sometimes, they give us different ways of seeing them. They allow us to access memories, emotions and parts of ourselves that might otherwise remain quiet.
Perhaps this is one of the most unexpected things about becoming multilingual: you do not just gain languages. You gain versions of yourself. Each language becomes connected to certain people, places, memories and stages of your life. Eventually, hearing a particular word can take you somewhere. A phrase can remind you of home. A certain accent can bring back a city. A language can carry an entire chapter of your life inside it.
And the more languages I learn, the less I feel that I have to choose between them. I can be the child who grew up speaking Darija and French, the student who learned MSA through school, the person who discovered the wider world through English, and the young adult who moved to Portugal and slowly made Portuguese part of his life. None of these selves cancels the others. They simply add up.
Maybe, in the end, learning languages is not only about finding new ways to communicate with other people. Maybe it is also about discovering how many different ways there are to be yourself.