As a Russian woman currently living in Finland, my family’s journey through languages and cultures has been full of unexpected turns. From meeting my husband in Germany, where we spoke English and German, to raising our children to be bilingual in Finnish and Russian, language has shaped much of our lives. This path was not always easy. It was full of beautiful moments like hearing my daughter call me ‘mama’ or my son wishing good night to my husband in Russian, but also full of painful ones, when I made a conscious decision to step away from my mother tongue. So in this story I reflect on how our multilingual household has shaped our lives, our children’s heritage, and my ongoing journey with language and identity. When my husband and I met in 2014 in Germany, where we both lived and worked, we communicated mostly in English and German. I hadn’t yet started learning Finnish, and although he had taken a few Russian classes at university, it was something he hadn’t used in years. Our relationship, much like many intercultural couples, was initially built on the common ground of a shared language that wasn’t native to either of us. As time passed, my husband took up Russian again with a teacher in 2017, and we gradually shifted to speaking Russian and English. My journey with Finnish, however, didn’t start until the summer of 2020 when I began online classes. Slowly but surely, Finnish started making its way into our daily lives.
Written by: Evgeniia Makhalina
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