French isn’t my mother tongue – that’d be Spanish, even though she did everything in her power not to speak it. My mother is her mother’s daughter, a naive girl who wanted the world to see her as she wasn’t to have a shot at becoming her true self. French is my father tongue – a language he spoke loudly and rudely, even though he didn’t have much to say. My father is his father’s son, a pathetic child who’s devastated the world sees him exactly as he is. Turns out, I’m my mother’s son.

It’s not that I dislike French. Yes, I dread having to endure its monotonous drone in public settings. Yes, I hate that its governing body is a clique of bigoted curmudgeons. Yes, I despise that it stills harbours colonialist delusions of grandeur. Yes, I abhor its nonsensical grammatical ‘rules’. I love it nonetheless, albeit in a Stockholm syndrome kind of way. It’s my French that I dislike. It’s become stiff and bland, a blunt tool for a job I haven’t been enjoying for years, a language that doesn’t fit the way I think and feel.

I refused to learn la langue des Américains when I was a teenager and instead spent fifteen years cobbling together just enough German to be able to order Weißwürste and Dampfnudel. I’ve had a tumultuous relationship with English, but that’s the thing, at least I have one. You can’t choose your family, as they say, and I didn’t choose French. You can choose your friends, and I don’t have many, but I chose Austen, Shelley, Whitman, Dickinson, Chesterton, Orwell, Twain, Faulkner, Hemingway, Morrison, Woolf and all the amazing bloggers that’re following in their footsteps.

English has become a refuge, the language I read and listen to when I can’t bear to write and speak a single word of French any more. I’ve come to appreciate its duality – it’s so thrifty that it contracts its verbs and has only a single gender, but it’s so extravagant that it has at least two words for every concept. It’s a babbling brook that has an ebullient and sometimes cacophonous flow to it, where French conjures the image of the Loire and the Seine, slow and wide rivers that make me want to drown myself.

It’s the language of not one but two imperialistic projects that’s been wonderfully bastardized by the colonized to form a new lingua franca, sternly spoken in Brussels and joyously sung in Mumbai. I love the English language’s embodied values just as much as I loathe French’s codified ones. I like the aesthetic of French. I vastly prefer the practice of English.