I speak English with my dad and Swedish with my mom; it's quite schizophrenic.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
People in Finland have also adopted me because of my dad, and that's great, but it's the one language I can't speak.
I speak Swedish, it's my first language. Of course, growing up with Latin American parents from Argentina, I also have some other influences from other cultures. But Sweden is where I feel the most at home.
My mother always spoke to me in English, so it's technically my maternal language, and it became a kind of private language - I was happy that I could speak in English to my mum and the majority of people wouldn't understand it.
My dad is from Japanese descent, my mom is from Swedish descent and, through marriages and divorces, a pretty multicultural family - a lot of Spanish speakers in the family.
For me, at least, much of the German I see and hear sounds stranger than Swedish, a language of which I unfortunately understand very little.
All my mom's side speaks Spanish. I speak to my grandparents in Spanish. Slowly. And they're patient with me! But I do speak with them in Spanish and carry on conversations with them.
My mother-in-law speaks not a word of English. I speak not a word of Tajiki. So I smile at her ingratiatingly and she fixes me with a beady eye.
We've got so many different cultural groups in my family that I've had to learn to accommodate them in different ways. My father speaks different to my mum. My mum speaks different to my grandmother. Everybody speaks different, so you find you start tweaking your language to be more accessible to people.
My father is Swedish and my mother is French.
I speak Swedish mainly with my kids' friends.