As Lindquist and Khan (2019) note, language and emotion shape each other reciprocally: how we speak influences how we feel, and how we feel influences the way we use language

To replicate a mother-tongue is to emotionalize it. A language must be lived in as a vessel of emotion, memory, and identity.

A few nights ago, I was watching a Portuguese stand-up comedian, Andrés de Freitas. In one of his comedy sketches, he said that English gave him a sense of freedom because all his trauma happened in Portuguese. He even pointed out that in English he can casually say “I love you” to a stranger, or engage in humorously exaggerated dirty talk, things... See more