There is a Ukrainian proverb that translates, roughly, as: "A bird is known by its song, and a person by their language." I have carried this proverb with me across every border I have crossed.
To be Ukrainian is to understand, in a visceral and personal way, the relationship between language and identity — the way a language can be a form of resistance, a declaration of selfhood, an act of love for a people and a place. Ukrainian has survived centuries of suppression, periods when it was banned from schools and churches and public life, when to speak it was an act of defiance. It has survived, and it has flourished, because language is not merely a tool of communication. It is the vessel of a people's soul.
I think of this often when I work with my students — particularly those who come from communities where their native language has been marginalised or devalued. The message I want every one of them to receive is this: your language is not a barrier to learning English. It is a resource. The linguistic knowledge you carry in your first language — the grammar, the vocabulary, the cultural knowledge encoded in idiom and proverb — is a foundation, not an obstacle.
This is one of the most important insights of modern applied linguistics, and one that is still insufficiently understood in many educational contexts. The goal of ESL education is not to replace the learner's first language with English. It is to add English to the rich linguistic repertoire the learner already possesses. Bilingualism and multilingualism are not signs of confusion; they are signs of cognitive flexibility and cultural richness.
When I left Ukraine, I did not leave my language behind. I carry it with me in the particular way I construct a sentence, in the proverbs that surface in my mind when I am searching for a way to express something complex, in the music of Ukrainian that I sometimes hear beneath the English I speak every day.
This, I believe, is the deepest truth about language: it is not something you have. It is something you are. And no border, no distance, no passage of time can take that from you.
