Where are you from?

While travelling in the American southwest with my family last summer, I had an odd experience. We had been seated in a restaurant and were discussing the menu, in Italian. The waitress came over and asked if we had any questions, and my husband turned to her and spoke in perfect, albeit heavily accented English. When it came time to take the orders, she started speaking with my husband and asked him what the ‘children’ wanted (the children are teenagers).

Number one son started speaking in ‘the Queen’s English’, and once he finished, his brother immediately followed suit. I then started speaking in American English, and you could see the waitress needed a moment to process that each party in this seemingly normal family had a completely different accent when speaking in English. 

Curiosity got the better of her and she asked, ‘but where are you from?’  Ah, what is normally a simple question to answer for most people, for us becomes incredibly complicated.  I am American but have been living in England for more than 20 years, but I arrived via Brussels.

My husband is half Italian, half German and has
lived in more than six countries throughout his life. Our children, are relatively normal, having been born and raised in London. But then, they aren't really normal, are they?

They have parents from different nationalities, while being raised in a third. They have the major advantage of being brought up in a bilingual household, and as a result, find learning additional languages fairly easy compared to their monolingual friends. And if you ask them which nationality they most identify with, the answer depends on which set of grand parents they have most recently visited and which international sports competitions are currently taking place. 

The only thing that is certain, is that they don't
feel English. But then, we live in London, and if I look around at the friends that we have, our children are absolutely normal.  Many of our friends are mixed nationality couples, with interesting combinations such as Irish/Syrian, German/Chinese and Dutch/ Chilean. London is a multicultural melting pot and no one bats an eyelid when a family is made up of many different nationalities. In fact, it is often the norm.

Written by Eva Stock. Eva is Director of Sponsors Relations at FOCUS.



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