A few days back, I decided to launch on my Instagram account a new hashtag #instaimperfects. I know I don’t have a huge power on Instagram, in terms of followers, but still I strongly think it’s important to send a message like this one. Why?
Scrolling on my Instagram feed I noticed that even those accounts who are willing to show the “real life” with imperfections and whatsoever are always extremely polished and sincerely I’m starting to get bored of all the glossy and lacquered pictures on my feed. Besides, all these profiles are almost always in English and belong to English native speakers. Nothing against that but it was a sort of revelation that punched me in the face. I cannot really empathize with someone who never tried to be understood in another language. I simply can’t or at least not now.
As an immigrant in a foreign country (for the third time in my life) I need a community (even virtual one) of people that experienced the same gaps and are proud to tell their own way of dealing with those. I know I’m not the only one out there and I want to loudly say that we need to recognize there is another linguistic experience arising: the Millennial Language.
Millennial Language is the one we, born between 1980 and 1990, use to communicate our experience as expatriates. It’s not our mothertongue and no matter our origins WE HAVE to use it when living abroad. We learned how to explain our needs, how to build our thinking process in another language that sometimes isn’t the language of the country in which we are living at the moment. Most of the time this language is English but it can be any other major language.
It is a sort of mediation tool through which we learned how to tell our own stories and how to make them understandable for everyone.
We use it on social networks, we make it live on our captions on Instagram as well as on our Facebook status. We spread it all around without even realize. This is something we don’t have to take for granted. This is a revolution.
This is a totally new skill that combined with our own capacities and studies and behaviours made us people who can overcome any kind of barriers. And we actually do! We worked in different countries abroad, we met people from anywhere in the world and we overcame every cultural, religious, linguistic, mental barriers by speaking to each other using OUR language. We, as the Millennial Generation, have this extremely strong power that sums up in the creation of a common way of understanding each other through a new form of ungrammatical, syntactically different form of English/French/Spanish that bonds us together in the same storytelling process. We speak a sort of different dialect of this language in every single countries, mixing it with local words and names.
This is something we should put on our CVs!
This is our English and we have to acknowledge it. It’s one of our most important contribution and an extraordinary tool we made out of the globalizing world. It is not perfect but it is Open Source and we can mould it, shaping it following the change of our personal way of constructing the storytelling process. It’s a new pidgin language and we are giving this to the next generation to use it and to shape it as they would need to.
Kudos to us all!
Vattelapesca 