“Words are not important in themselves, but as resonators for a center. […] All language is a longing for home.” — Coleman Barks in The Essential Rumi (pg. 17) If all language is a longing for home, and we speak English in a sea of Finnish, we will always associate home with another time, another place and another people. We will always see ourselves as other. And guess what?

Kris Broholm and I sat down to talk about identity, finding home and learning Finnish. We’d met at the Polyglot Gathering in Berlin back in 2014 but it was only this year that the idea of doing an episode of Actual Fluency came up. We carved out time in our schedules over Easter and had a great conversation! Kris was living in Budapest at the time and learning Hungarian, and though we didn’t plan for it, we found a lot of common ground about the weather. Kris runs the Actual Fluency Podcast and regularly interviews multilingual and multicultural people to further his own quest to speak 10 language, which you can read more about it here.

Where you lay your head at night. Where your family is. Where you grew up. Where most of your friends are. Where you work. Where you love to be. Where you feel at home…

The concept of home is ever-fleeting, especially for those of us who may have several homes, or even no exact place to call our own. What makes it even more confusing is that home means different things to different people.