The Multilingual Self

Romeo (Lab Diagnostics Executive) - English & Spanish

How long would you wait for a life you once saw on a screen? Romeo was born in Romania and grew up under communism. He has lived in the United States since 2005, when he and his wife, who had just won the green card lottery and was expecting their first child, landed in Boston. He studied medical biology, holds an MBA, and built a career in lab diagnostics, including marketing for Latin America and North America. Today he also runs a franchise business in Indiana, where the family lives with their two sons. In this conversation, we talk about the boy who watched Dallas on television in communist Romania and decided that if he ever left, it would be for America, and about the sixteen years of patience between the fall of communism and the day he finally moved. We talk about what stayed Romanian (faith, food, holidays with friends in Indianapolis) and what it meant, after twenty years, never to be excluded for his accent. And we talk about raising two boys in Romanian and Spanish, neither of them the language of the world they live in: books with one language on each half of the page, a trip to Mexico, and Spanish songs on YouTube during ping pong in the basement. Spanish came last, and by choice. It began as a project with his older son and a teacher from Madrid, and stayed because Romeo found he loved it. Speaking a third language, he says, is a victory for his brain, and a window he keeps open for the day he works across Latin America again. The conversation starts in English, the language of his last twenty years, and moves to Spanish, the one he chose for himself.

• Chapters

Arndt (Business Owner) - Spanish

What happens when the words you need most aren't in the language you were born into? Arndt is German, born and raised in northern Germany, and has lived in the United States for more than 25 years, where he owns a chiropractic franchise in Ohio and works as a leadership and life transition coach after two decades in corporate sales leadership. English became the language of his daily and professional life after the move. Spanish came last, picked up almost by accident during the isolation of the pandemic, and it opened onto something he never expected: a deep, unplanned connection to Argentina that eventually became his podcast, Jamás tan argentino. In this conversation, we talk about the day Arndt's father was dying in Germany, and Arndt, stuck in the US with travel impossible, needed to send a final message by WhatsApp, and how German, his own mother tongue, gave him nothing, while the lyrics of a song by an Argentine singer helped him find the words. We talk about starting therapy during the pandemic, the quiet judgment he felt just for admitting he needed help, and the relief of finding an Argentine therapist with whom Spanish let him open up in a way English and German never had. And we talk about the friendships he has built almost entirely across a screen, some sustained for years without ever meeting in person, and the small vocabulary of Argentine affection, gordo, negrita, te quiero mucho, that took some getting used to translated literally into German. What Arndt describes isn't a language changing who he is. It's a language finally letting a part of him through, the part that could say goodbye to his father, sit with a therapist and mean it, risk being a beginner in public, on a podcast, in his third language. The conversation is in Spanish throughout, the language he says lets him speak from the heart instead of chasing perfection.

Sonya (Leadership Coach) - Spanish, German & English

What do you pass on to your children when the language you give them isn't even your first? Sonya Rumpf grew up in Massachusetts with a German mother and an American father of Jewish origin. She spent her summers in Germany, absorbed the language through play and family, and went back for a full year in high school. Then a Rotary scholarship took her to Medellín, where she completed a master's degree — writing two hundred pages of academic Spanish, defending her thesis, becoming fluent through full immersion. There she met Juan David, her future husband. They married in California and settled back in Massachusetts, where they are now raising three children. At home, there are four languages. Sonya speaks to her children in German. Juan David speaks to them in Spanish. Their oldest daughter attends a Mandarin immersion school. English is the air they breathe. In this conversation, we talk about what it means to build a marriage across two languages — and how English gradually became the foundation while Spanish never fully left. We talk about the social architecture Sonya and Juan David have designed almost without realizing it: Spanish at the table, English when the kids leave the room. We talk about the German she stepped away from for nearly ten years and the German she is now relearning alongside her own children — her seven-year-old already reading ahead of her. We also talk about what it means to choose, as a second-language speaker, to raise children in that language. The doubt. The consistency required. The fear that something won't be understood. And the moment Sonya realized none of it was actually getting in the way. The conversation moves through Spanish, German, and English — sometimes within a single exchange — which is, in itself, the whole point.

Adela (UX Designer) - Spanish

What happens to your identity when you leave your mother tongue behind and build a life in someone else's? Adela Jablonska is Polish, holds a degree in Hispanic philology, and became the first Polish copywriter in the Argentine advertising industry. She has lived between Buenos Aires and Punta del Este for eleven years — brought here, as she says, by love — and speaks a near-native Rioplatense Spanish. She never took accent coaching. The language came through immersion, through work, through an intercultural relationship, and through years of letting Argentina in. In this conversation, we talk about what it means to write creatively in your second language and build a professional voice in an industry that is deeply local. We talk about inhabiting intimacy in a language that is not your own, and what it took to feel at home inside an Argentine family from day one. We talk about the moment she realized she was dreaming in Spanish, and what that shift says about where a language truly lives. And we talk about what stays Polish in her — even now, even here. Adela also offers something that may surprise you: being a non-native speaker, she argues, is not a disadvantage in her field. It is an edge. The conversation is in Spanish throughout, with the warmth of Punta del Este and the cadence of Buenos Aires running through every exchange.

Rodolphe (Anthropologist) - Spanish

What does it mean to earn the right to go unnoticed? Rodolphe is French, has lived in Buenos Aires for sixteen years, and became an Argentine citizen in 2024. In this episode, he shares what it felt like when getting a passport changed his relationship with his own accent overnight, and why he decided it was finally time to do something about it. We talk about what he calls the "right to indifference" — the freedom to board a bus, walk into a shop, or take a taxi without your voice immediately marking you as foreign. We talk about Argentine curiosity and why, unlike in France, Spain, or the United States, people here will tell you their entire family history within five minutes of meeting you. And we talk about what it means to build an identity that cannot fully be classified — and why that ambiguity, uncomfortable as it is, can also be a victory. Rodolphe is an anthropologist by training, and that comes through in the way he thinks about identity: not as something you simply feel, but as something that has to be recognized by the other side too. He calls what he went through not reinvention, but displacement ('desplazamiento') — a word that carries both the cost and the gain of choosing to become someone new.

Joseph (Golf Coach) - Spanish & English

What does it take to choose who you become in another language? José is a golf coach from Texas who speaks English, Spanish, and German, and reads Latin. In this episode, he shares the story of how he decided to fully commit to the Rioplatense variety of Spanish, and what it meant to build not just an accent, but a whole identity around that choice. We talk about performance pressure and why what you can do in practice rarely shows up the way you want it to when it counts, in golf and in language. We talk about confidence as something that can be acquired, not just possessed. And we talk about what it felt like the first time a stranger in Chile mistook him for Argentine. The first half of the conversation is in Spanish. The second is in English. What stays the same across both is José himself, with a different facet of who he is finding its way to the surface in each one.