Here’s a collection of conversations I had with multilinguals about their transformation journey living life in multiple languages. I hope you get inspired by them and see new possibilities in yourself and how you are creating your own multilingual lifestyle.
Name: Joseph (USA)
Languages: Spanish + English
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Golf coach with 19 years of experience, Joseph speaks English, Spanish, and German, and reads Latin. He fell in love with Argentine culture through YouTube before he ever set foot there, and decided to make Rioplatense Spanish his own — voceo, sh and all. In Chile, a shopkeeper once mistook him for Argentine.
Name: Rodolphe (France)
Languages: Spanish
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French anthropologist turned Argentine citizen, Rodolphe has called Buenos Aires home for over 15 years — long enough to build a family there, and eventually a passport. He naturalized in 2024, and that’s when the real work began: a passport changes how others see you, and suddenly a Spanish that was “good enough” no longer was. He calls his goal el derecho a la indiferencia — the right to board a taxi without being immediately read as foreign.
Name: Adela (Poland)
Languages: Spanish
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UX designer and content strategist, Adela came to Argentina in 2015 following someone she loved — a detour from the life in Spain she had planned. She became what may be the first Polish copywriter in Argentine advertising, arguing about grammar and syntax with native colleagues — and winning. Today she thinks, works, and dreams in Spanish, though her friends in Poland say she now speaks Polish with a Spanish melody. She has been with her Argentine partner for over eleven years.
Name: Sonya (USA)
Languages: Spanish, German & English
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Leadership coach, daughter of a German mother and American father, Sonya grew up shuttling between continents. A Rotary scholarship took her to Medellín, where she wrote a 200-page academic thesis in Spanish and met the Colombian man she would later marry. Today they raise three children together: she speaks to them exclusively in German, he in Spanish, and their oldest attends a Mandarin immersion school. Four languages, one home, and Sonya somewhere in the middle of all of it — which is, she says, the most herself she’s ever felt.