Since I spoke at the Brand You World Telesummit the other week, I have been having several conversations about the joys and tribulations that come from having lived abroad for most of your life.

One of my listeners asked me about prejudices.

What is the worst prejudice I have ever encountered and how did I deal with it?

Apart from having to deal with the fact that people think that Italians are chronically late (which has turned me into a punctuality freak), there is another one I find rather disturbing.

And I was extremely glad to discover years ago that I was not the only one experiencing it.

Here is the story.

An Italian friend of mine had been working for a major international news agency in Brussels for many years. She wanted to move within the organisation and applied for a job in London. One of the first questions her future boss asked her was ‘Can you write English, dear?’

What is it that makes certain people think that, if you grew up speaking and writing one language, you will never be able to write well in another? Have they never heard of Joseph Conrad?

Even if they haven’t, they must have seen ‘Some Like It Hot‘.

The person who wrote the screenplay of this icon of Hollywood’s golden age had grown up in Austria-Hungary speaking German. Billy Wilder was already well into his 20s when he emigrated to America and learned English. He had been writing in German (as a journalist in Berlin) for his entire life.

Joseph Conrad and Billy Wilder are just examples. There are so many others. I am absolutely convinced that if you write well in one language you can write just as well in another.

I guess what you need is a sense for the rhythm of that language and you need to do a large amount of reading. And yes, at this point, I have to give credit to Ian, the editor of Central European Business Weekly, the English newspaper I wrote for at the beginning of my career.

We spent several hours drinking Becherovka (we were after all in Prague) and going through my articles, which used to have far too many subordinate clauses (from having written in German for too long).

So my answer to my listener would be ‘Never let other people’s limits become your own’.

According to an old Czech saying, a person has as many personas as the number of languages they speak.

The visit of my friend Verena from Germany gave me the opportunity last week to dwell on my Austrian/German persona.

I have already written in a previous post about the languages I think in. But I have the feeling that exploring my various personas and how they came into being won’t be as easy.

In the same post I wrote how speaking German makes me feel grounded.

There is something about certain German expressions that gives me the illusion that life is linear, very well structured, made up of things you can rely on 100%… An old friend of mine used to say that thinking in German is like putting your kitchen in order, cups with the cups, plates with the plates.

I remember sitting in a lecture hall at my university in Innsbruck listening to the voice of my math professor (I had to concentrate on his voice (¦math has never been my thing). My mind would dance with the rhythm of the language and build perfect loops that would end, like German sentences, with the verb at the end. My gaze would drift to the window and beyond to embrace the wonderful might of the Alps clad in white, glowing in the winter sun.

I will never forget the time I heard someone speak old Prague German. It used to be the language of Franz Kafka and Max Brod. It used to be the voice of the soul of a world that no longer exists. Ignorance and hatred did away with it as one would do with the dusty old scenes of a theatre ready to be burned.

Prague German has a wonderful music to it. I could see elegant women sitting at Art Deco cafes on Venceslav Square wearing long tight skirts and sipping Viennese coffee. I could hear the sound of George Gershwin drifting from the ballroom of the Hotel Pariz. It was like a dream I never wanted to awake from.

It is all these memories that build my Austrian/German persona like the shining pieces of a Byzantine mosaic.

Going back to my translation of the Czech saying I like so much, the word “persona” in old Latin means mask. Is that what it is? Do we put on a mask every time we speak another language and interact with another culture?

I have the suspicion that this might be what happens at the beginning then the “mask” melts into your skin and many years later you realise that it has become part of who you are.

“In which language do you think?”

I used to hate this questions. Every time someone would ask my friend Jiri (a Czech interpreter working in different languages), he would say that most of the time he did not think.

And I felt like giving the same answer last night, when Francesca, my Italian guest sharing our rainy London summer with me, asked the question over dinner.

But for some reason, this time the notorious question got me thinking…

In my mind I began taking a tour of the past and remembering how I ended up speaking the languages I speak.

I grew up speaking Italian. In school I learned English and German. I liked German so much that I ended up being the best in the school. German struck a chord in my brain; it just sounded so familiar and logical to me.

My father used to teach English and was very strict with my English. He would make sure that I spoke correctly. I am now enormously grateful to him.

In Prague I studied Czech, the world’s seventh most difficult language. I picked up enough to have two job interviews in Czech in my last years in Prague. After Czech, French seemed like a walk in the park. When I could not think of a word in French, I thought of the equivalent in Italian and in many cases the word in French would be similar.

German is probably the language that has had the strongest influence on me. It functions as a mental scheme. It is a crutch I hold on to when things get hectic around me. Italian is the language of my childhood. It has a certain sensibility to it that I use as a point of reference when I have to communicate difficult messages.

I speak and write English so much these days that it has become second nature to me. English has an aura of discipline. In business, it helps you to say what you have to say in a very matter-of-fact way, which I miss in Italian or French.

The language I have the most peculiar relationship with is Czech. When I lived in Prague, people were coming out of the Cold War and were not used to having foreigners sweating their way through their difficult language, so they were for ever correcting your grammar (I can still hear my friend Jana, “you have to use the third case here”).

It was inevitable to feel self-conscious. But there is a person in Prague I really love speaking Czech with. It is my friend Frantisek (Frank): he drives a taxi, loves Kentucky Fried Chicken and has never really heard of political correctness. Frank does not care if I make mistakes; he keeps telling me that I speak Czech better than many other foreigners (at this point, you might have guessed that Frank does not like foreigners…).

Off we go in his old, battered taxi through the Bohemian countryside chatting about his grandson, his new girlfriend and his love for dishes garnished with the interiors of various animals.

There is certain wisdom about Frank; the same can be said for Czech. It is the perfect language to demonstrate how surreal life can sometimes be. So when I feel overwhelmed by life, I think of certain sayings in Czech and feel like smiling again.

I guess languages like memories are made by people. The more someone is on your mind the more you think in the language you spoke with them.

I am aware that one could write an encyclopedia about the A-word. This is why I really enjoyed Yang-May’s podcast on her two voices.

I have always been fascinated by accents until they became such an integral part of my life that I started developing a love-and-hate relationship with them. I now refer to them as the A-word. Speaking five languages has done interesting things to mine.

This is why I was not surprised when, last year, the A-word followed me all the way to Norway.

I was sitting in the cozy lobby of a hotel in Lillehammer, talking on my mobile phone in an agitated German about the fate of a friend in Prague. Across the coffee table from me, two Israeli grandmas were debating the pros and cons of braving the snow outside to go buy souvenirs in town. But something more interesting came up…. One of the two understood German and began translating the contents of my anguished monologue to her friend.

When, at the peak of the outrage, I uttered the word Schweinerei (how disgusting..), the two ladies really got into it, with a passion I thought they would reserve only for their favorite Polish soap.

At some point in my frantic conversation, the battery of my phone decided to give up on me. I sighted and stood up to go continue the live commentary of my friend’s destiny in my hotel room.
“Sind Sie aus Wien?” (Are you from Vienna?), one of the ladies spoke a very sweet German from a world that, unfortunately, is no more.

I answered that I wasn’t, but that I had studied in Austria.

The other granny threw me a serious look from the middle of her wrinkled face : “Yor akcent gives ya avay!”

Does it?

A couple of weeks ago, I was at a function in the European Parliament sailing my way around the buffet, when I got introduced to an Irishman. A handshake followed by the usual pleasantries.

“I thought you were Italian…You sound like an English oppressor”. His face twisted in semi-horror.

“You don’t know how happy I am to hear that…”

His look escalated into full-scale horror.

Actually, it did make me happy, but for reasons that do not have anything to do with centuries-old blood feuds, ships sailing to America or leprecauns.

For most of my life, my father (who used to teach English) has had this infatuation with British accents. He gave up on me years ago when, after a long summer spent in the US, a friend told him I sounded like his next-door neighbor from Jacksonville, Florida.

My fellow raider-of -the-buffet at the European Parliament really made my day that evening and filled my heart with joy - an emotion seldom encountered in the sterile halls of the European Parliament.

However, sailing under the wrong flag has its limits.

Last winter, I was having dinner with an English friend in Paris, in one of those bistros with tables so close to each other that you could try on your neighbor’s shoes without much effort. And I would have loved to do so, since sitting next to me was a very fashion-conscious couple from Rome.

I have this tendency to get sucked into other people’s conversations (I worked for too long as a journalist: once an observer, always an observer…). The Romans were carrying on a conversations about the virtues of the thermal waters of a town on lake Garda where I used to be sent to as a child.

“Are you still taking the Acqua di Sirmione…? Your snoring is getting better…” a perfectly manicured hand patted the proud husband’s cheek

Half of my brain was looking forward to the rest of this conversation. But my face must have revealed the painful effort of retrieving pictures of muddy waters from the most remote corners of my memory. The couple sensed an energetic wave of interest coming from our table.

“Ma, ste’ qua so proprio inglesi” (These two are really English), the hand made a gesture in our direction revealing a rather expensive ring.

The husband raised his head, took a good look at my face, swallowed a piece of shrimp rather abruptly and did not return to the subject of his nocturnal musical performances…

So much for the lure of the A-word!