You might have read Elif Shafak, the writer of “Forty Rules of Love”. Turkish is her mother tongue; still, she chose to write this masterpiece and her other literary works in English. In an interview, when asked why she chose English over Turkish, she replied that writing in English freed her from the cultural and psychological constraints she had unconsciously internalised in Turkish. For her, writing in English creates a cognitive distance that enables her to take a closer look at Turkishness.
So, a writer who lives with two or three languages does not simply choose one to write her story on the page. It’s a constant struggle to choose what to leave behind. This is the quiet ordeal for L2 or multilingual authors. It’s not just about writing in a specific language; it’s about which language lets them safely put their ideas down in a more powerful and effective way. So, writing in another language is not just a random decision; it’s their continuous, disciplined suppression.
You might have also read Khaled Hosseini, the author of “The Kite Runner” and “A Thousand Splendid Suns”, and while reading his work, you might have come across some Afghan words italicised like kolba, dokhtar, hamshira and other such words embedded in the English sentences, or those scenes when the character suddenly slips to Afghani during conversation. We can call it code-switching when a character in a story suddenly switches to another language mid-sentence. These changes aren’t made to make the story pretty or to make it look pretty — they’re made because that’s how it comes to the writer. Words that seem out of place in the overall context make you think of small rooms locked shut. Some readers stand outside them, not inside, but feel the depth they cannot explore and understand. Some readers might feel excluded in such scenes, as the writer, through such words, has breached the contract of full disclosure.
This alienated feeling is quite observable when a character cracks a joke in another language, but the monolingual reader is unable to get it; for such jokes or idioms, the writer has to add a footnote, and a joke with a footnote is already dead. Here, the writer can rely on the reader’s familiarity with the context, because the scene’s action and the characters’ responses are important even if the punchline is not entirely within the reader.
Then comes the real game changer: the syntax. The syntax of the author’s mother tongue is always present; even if he writes his whole piece in English, the syntax of the first language influences the sentence beneath the surface, in the pause, in the repetition. The reader continues reading, unaware that he or she is seeing another grammar ghost. The language may be English, but the foundations on which it is standing may not be English.
All these little details raise a question: whether multilingual writing expands the host language, or does it limit what a language can hold? Both could be true; the blend of languages is evidence of expansion, but when an idiom or phrase is not provided with context, then it means that something has not made the crossing. A full explanation is a gift for the reader, but it also shows that the reader cannot tolerate not knowing. Withholding the explanation helps the reader in two ways: first, by enabling them to sit in peace with partial understanding, and second, by exposing them to a language other than their native one.
So, multilingual or L2 writing is an adventure land where readers are always welcome, but there’s no guidebook.