In the strictest sense, we all have a mother tongue as we all have only one (biological) mother. – But does this mean that the language our mother talked to us is automatically our mother tongue?

What about this friend I had in school, who was adopted when she was 2 and grew up in a Dutch family: would her mother tongue be Swahili because her mum was talking Swahili to her or would it be Dutch, because this was the language the mother who adopted her talked to her?

Usually, mother tongue – or father tongue to be politically correct! –  defines the first language we were exposed to, chronologically speaking, our L1, the first language we understand, speak, the one we grew up with or that our parents (or caregivers) speak with us. And usually people tend to speak this language for a long time.

If we want to define the first language we speak, learn and feel comfortable with, the term first language may seem more appropriate. This first language doesn’t have to be one. In bilingual families it can be two or three: the important aspect to define a language as first language is, that the child uses it on a regular basis, preferably every day from the very beginning. Linguists suggested a few years ago that an exposure of at least 20% of the daily time would be optimal for a child to become (almost) equally proficient in the family languages (but this has changed already and the duration of exposure is not the most important factor of becoming a bilingual!).

If there are more than one first languages in a family, we can also use the term of family languages: these would be for example the language a child talks with the mother, another one with the father, a third one with a caregiver (i.e. at daycare, school etc.), maybe a next one with extended family or locals, a fourth one with friends… Simultaneous bilinguals or multilinguals are exposed to more than one (or two) languages since day one. Successive bilinguals or multilinguals, are those who add other languages after having acquired the first language(s).

Using a term like family languages works if the language situation within the family is stable. And it would also work for extended family would share these languages – But we all know that in multilingual families, the languages we speak at home can vary and the situation can shift. Situations change, we move abroad, we immerse into other cultures and languages and within a bilingual family this can be a reason for preferring one language to another – even if only for a certain period of time.
I personally prefer and use the term of home languages when I talk about the languages a family speaks at home, as there can be other people involved: caregivers, nannies, babysitters etc. can speak another language to my child on a daily/weekly basis and this language would become one of the most important languages for my child.

My languages

Let’s consider my personal language situation: my parents only spoke German with me and my sister, but we were exposed to Italian since day one. We didn’t “learn” it in the conventional, academical way, so Italian counts as our second-mother-tongue or one of our first languages. – Usually, when people ask me which is my mother tongue (or mother language) I answer German and Italian. Both languages are still equally dominant and valuable for me.

If I analyze the different phases in my life, there were phases where Italian or French or German were dominant languages. In one phase (of almost 6 years) I would mainly speak Italian and French (and study Old-French and Old-Provençal, which felt like “living” in this time and period!). During that period I really had difficulties communicating in German and couldn’t form a complete sentence in German.

Only when this linguistic situation changed and I focused more on German and Italian, my German became more dominant for a short period.

English is the fourth language I’ve learned and I didn’t use it very often from age 20 to 34. I did re-activate and improve it when we moved to the Netherlands and our children started attending an English school. At the same time I also improved my Dutch.

In the last 11 years, English and Dutch became the most dominant languages, with German being our family language.

Therefore, my first languages are now German, English and Dutch, with occasionally Italian (the language that still feels like the closest to my heart!), French and Swissgerman (and adding Spanish to the picture which I have a great passive knowledge in but where I’m working on the verbal fluency).

What are my children’s first languages?

From a chronological point of view, Italian and Swiss-German are the “first languages” for all of my children, but only for their first years, because we decided at some point to only speak German with them – while still reading and singing with them in Swiss-German and Italian –, and this changed again when they started attending the Dutch daycare and then an English school.

Today – I should better say “at the moment”…– they consider German, English and Dutch as their main languages, i.e. the ones they are most fluent in. These are their most dominant languages. They don’t feel that confident in Swiss-German or Italian at the moment, but I know by my own experience that this can change if the linguistic situation changes again or if they just decide to talk them more often.

For multilingual children, the linguistic situation within the family and social context changes constantly, and if this happens in their early years, the concept of “first language” changes too, it only refers to the first language acquired, so in strictly chronological terms.

The first language or mother tongue plays an important role in sociolinguistics, as it is the basis for people’s sociolinguistic identity. Terms like native language or mother tongue refer to an ethnic group rather than to the first language. This all confuses families and teachers as, usually, one needs to indicate the “mother tongue” of the children when signing them up for a daycare or school. This is why I always recommend to indicate also the languages that our children are most dominant in at the moment… 

Native speakers are considered to be “authority on their given language due to their natural acquisition process regarding the language, versus having learned the language later in life”.

By concentrating on the natural acquisition process, my native languages would be German, Italian, Swiss-German and Dutch because I did acquire them naturally, i.e. without “studying” them. I did not “learn” them at school, I did imitate speakers and copy sentences. I learnt how to read and write them partly at school – German and Italian.

The fact that someone is a “native” speaker because he or she acquired this language at an early stage, doesn’t really make sense to me. We all need to nurture our languages, learn the different meanings of words, form longer sentences, find out what register to use in different settings, which all takes many years!

Fact is that we are perfectly able to acquire a language in a “natural” way also in a later stage of our life. And if a language we acquired or learnt later in life becomes our most dominant language, i.e. the one we speak most, write in and read, our “first language” or “mother tongue” can become a secondary language and sometimes even be lost… (cfr. language attrition).

In his lecture “English and Welsh” in 1955, J.R.R. Tolkien distinguishes the “native tongue” from the “cradle tongue”. The cradle tongue being the language we learn during early childhood and the native tongue “may be different, possibly determined by an inherited linguistic taste, and may later in life be discovered by a strong emotional affinity to a specific dialect (Tolkien confessed to such an affinity to the Middle English of the West Midlands in particular)” (cfr. pdf of “English and Welsh” by J.R.R. Tolkien)

We each have our own personal linguistic potential: we each have a native language. But that is not the language that we speak, our cradle-tongue, the first-learned. Linguistically we all wear ready-made clothes, and our native language comes seldom to expression, save perhaps by pulling at the ready-made till it sits a little easier. But though it may be buried, it is never wholly extinguished, and contact with other languages may stir it deeply.

My chief point here is to emphasize the difference between the first-learned language, the language of custom, and an individual’s native language, his inherent linguistic predilections: not to deny that he will share many of these with others of his community. He will share them, no doubt, in proportion as he shares other elements in his make-up. (cfr. “English and Welsh” by J.R.R. Tolkien, p.18)

There is so much to say (and write) about this topic! One could add the term of heritage language, which is often misunderstood as a synonym of mother language/tongue… But I’ll stop here.

The predilection of a language is more important than the chronological place it has in our language acquisition history. (Ute)

For me, personally, the language I prefer speaking and that is closest to my heart and I’m more spontaneous in, is not the language my parents talked to me during the first period of my life. What about you? Do you (still) prefer speaking the first language you learnt, or is another language more important for you right now?

If you are interested in this topic and would like to know more about it:

I hold workshops on bilingualism and parenting the bilingual child and consult parents, caregivers and teachers about it.

About the origin of the term mother tongue

“The origin of the term mother tongue harks back to the notion that linguistic skills of a child are honed by the mother and therefore the language spoken by the mother would be the primary language that the child would learn.” However, this type of culture-specific notion is a misnomer. The term was used by Catholic monks to designate a particular language they used, instead of Latin, when they are “speaking from the pulpit”.That is, the “holy mother of the Church” introduced this term and colonies inherited it from the Christianity as a part of their colonial legacy, thanks to the effort made by foreign missionaries in the transitional period of switching over from 18th-century Mercantile Capitalism to 19th-century Industrial Capitalism in India.” (cfr. wikipedia)

When children reach a certain age, parents want them to learn about what happens in the world. Many parents struggle with the way news are presented on TV. In fact, pictures and the way news are presented in the evening news can be quite traumatising. A great alternative are online news sites for children, where children and parents can choose the kind of news they think are appropriate and get more information about some topics in a child friendly way. What I personally like about online news is the choice to either read or watch the news.

Like in many multilingual families, my children like to have access to news in different languages. As I’m far from knowing about online news programms for children in other languages, asked some parents from the Multicultual Kid Blogs group to share news sites they recommend for children and am glad to share this here below.

Danish:

Rita Rosenback recommends the Danish site Kidsnews. You have to subscribe to the magazine, but the news videos are for free.

Dutch:

The Dutch Jeugdjournaal is a news programm for children that goes live every day at 18:45 and can also be watched online. There is also a Jeugdjournaal app that permits you to access news in a child appropriate format on mobile devices.

English (British):

Amanda van Mulligen suggested the BBC site for news. This site is very interesting not only for news but also for general information about different topics.

Another site that my children like to visit is the First News Site.

French:

Annabelle Humanes recommends the real paper newspaper that has also a news website. This website is, as far as I could see, without videos, therefore children need to be able to read to access the news.

Isabelle Barth points out that in France and in French-speaking countries, there is no News Channel just for children. But they have few channels just for childern an they have news in their programs. These channels are: Gulli, Tivi5mondeplus and canalj.

German:

On the German tivi site, children can watch news and choose the topics they’re interested in.

Italian:

The Italian site Bambininews offers news for children who already can read. In fact, there are no videos available (so far). Also, some Italian newspapers publish news sites for children, like Il Giorno. The TV channel RaiGulp offers also online access to some series and news, but, as far as I know, there is no video news programm online.

Norwegian:

And on the Norwegian site nrksuper children can access the news that are also aired on TV online.

Portuguese:

For Portuguese, Annabelle Humanes‘ husband recommends the Folinha de São Paulo, a website or supplement from an adult newspaper. It is Brazilian.

Russian:

Anna Watt recommends two Russian websites, one for a younger audience and one for 10-16 year olds and older.

Spanish:

The Spanish site educatumundo is an educational site for children, parents and teachers. Under noticias you can find several topics, written for children. These news are not available on video, but maybe there is another site that offers news clips in Spanish?

Swedish:

Rita Rosenback recommends the Swedish site SVT, where children can watch the news.

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Of course, these are only a few online news sites for children and I really would like to extend this list. Therefore, I would really be glad if you could recommend any further online news sites for children in the comments section here below (indicating your name and, if you have one, your website). – Thank you very much!

The Dutch language belongs to the westgerman branch of the indoeuropean languages and is actually close to German (and Swissgerman).

The simplified relation between the languages Dutch, English and German. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

For many foreigners the pronunciations of “Scheveningen” or “Gouda” are a challenge. It’s especially the way the <ch> and the intervocalic <g> is pronounced that creates some articulatory problems. For Swissgermans the voiceless velar fricative <g> [x] or [?] for the <ch> or the uvular fricative [?] are very well known. They sound similar to the German in “ach”, “Bach”, “Fach” etc.. Therefore this is not something Germans or Swissgermans would find difficult to pronounce. In the southern Dutch dialects these sounds are softer and <g> and <ch> represent the palatal fricatives ([?] and [ç]).

Something I personally found important to learn are the false cognates or false friends. People already fluent in German when learning Dutch, need to be aware of words that are phonetically similar and sometimes even have similar roots but are different in meanings:

The Dutch aandacht means “Aufmerksamkeit” (attention) in German, and the German “Andacht” means “devotion”.

The zetel is a seat and not a saddle (German “Sattel”), the winkel is a shop (“Laden”) and not an angle, like in German.

With vaart you don’t design the journey or trip (“Fahrt”), but only boat trip and varen refers to the movement of ships only.

Tot is not “tot” (dead) but only means “until” and is pronounced with a short /o/ (whereas the german “tot” has a long one /o:/.

A postbus is not a public means of transportation but a P.O. box (“Postfach”).

The kwartier is not a quarter or accomodation (germ.”Quartier”) but defines a quarter of an hour; and it’s often used in its diminutive form kwartiertje.

Glazuur has nothing to do with baking (germ.”Glasur”; icing) but is dental enamel (“Zahnschmelz”).

“Blaffen“ does not mean to snap at someone, like the German “anblaffen” but the barking of the dog. In German this way to snap is comparable to the barking of a dog though and both words have the same etymon. When a Dutch says that he’s going to call you on the phone, i.e. bellen (ik ga je bellen), which is the abbreviated form for opbellen, or ring at your door, a German would think that this person would bark at him (germ. bellen). For an English speaking person it doesn’t seem too weird, as the English bell (noun) is producing a similar sound although the English verb to bell has a different meaning i.e. the semantic fields for the Dutch bell and the English one are slightly different.

The sale signs for houses and flats puzzle every German speaking person who visits the Netherlands for the first time: te huur (which means “to rent”) seems very similar “to whore” (“huren” in German), but once you learn that <uu> is pronounced like [y?] you’ll get over it. A similar misunderstanding could occur with the verkocht sign, when a property is sold, since it really sounds like the word for “overcooked” in German (“verkocht”).

Te huur in Huizen (Photo credit: CorporatieNL)

Verkocht onder voorbehoud (Photo credit: the_riel_thing)

What were the analogies or similarities you found between German and Dutch? Or another language you know and Dutch?

Related articles

• “Guten Rutsch!”: what does this German wish really mean?

By acquiring other languages, our children do not only learn about the grammar but also about the cultures, the traditions. I always preferred learning by contexts and this means by reading and talking, by interacting with people. And my children do the same.

But we all know that there are periods where we can’t provide this ideal context of friends and family talking to our children, or total language immersion and need to draw on other tools.

When I was a child, the only tools we had were LPs with music and stories from other countries. It was the pre-satellite era and we didn’t receive TV programms than the national ones and the internet was not even invented… (yes, now I’m feeling old!). – Raising multilingual children nowadays, is incredibly easy compared to this. Our children have easy access to multilingual materials wherever they are.

Personally, I don’t consider watching TV (or DVD’s) a very good way to teach language to our children, but I know, from my own experience, that it can really help to build at least a passive vocabulary. I prefer the internet sites of Radio or TV channels, which offer a really large variety of activities and games that are a much more active way to spend screen time. And by watching some TV programmes via internet, my children can choose the times that fit better in their personal schedules and usually they switch to interactive sites pretty quick. – My children are not allowed to watch TV during the week due to time constraints, hence they really enjoy their screen time in the weekends.

Here are the sites that my children visit when they have time:

For German: KiKa (Kinderkanal/channel for children) offers a considerable amount of valuable shows, games, riddles, and lists of books for children of any age. My children like to watch the “Sendung mit der Maus” (some video and youtube excerpts here ) on Sundays. My girls like the “Sonntagsmärchen” (Sunday tales, mainly Grimms’ tales but also from other cultures) and my son “Willi wills wissen” where all kind of curious questions are answered.

For English: my kids visited regularly the sites of the bbc cbeebies when they were younger, but now they prefer bitesize, or history for kids and the bbc site about culture.

For Dutch: children can watch filmpjes, visit kro kindertijd or kids nickelodeon, sites with games and other fun activities for children.

For Italian: I must admit that my children barely watch Italian TV or visit Italian internet sites. But this is only because they already have so much on their plates. Nevertheless, I can recommend the channel Rai Gulp with programmes for all age groups. What my son prefers watching are hockey games of his favourite Swiss (Italian) team and he reads everything about it.

My children love to listen to music. The fact that they understand everything in so many languages makes them very proud and I think that music as much as poetry helps a lot to learn and improve languages and to learn about the different cultures. But they also love to listen to audio stories. When they were younger, we used to listen to audio stories on our long car rides. For German these were mostly Grimm’s tales , Bibi Blocksberg,  Pumuckl . For English, they liked stories from Barefoot books and for Dutch we have a whole series of audiobooks from Disney called “lees mee“.  Among the Swissgerman stories, they particularly liked Globi, Kasperli.

©expatsincebirth; Kasperle; Globi

Personally, I think that folktales in general are very good to teach our children about the culture related to the languages they’re learning. They teach about the mentality and the core values. Of course, modern tales which are very country specific, like Nijntje and Mega MIndi in the Netherlands, can be added to the more traditional ones. – But this will be the topic for another post.

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I did write this post as part of the Multicultural Kid Blogs October Blogging Carnival about using media to raise multicultural children. It is hosted by Olga Mecking on European Mama.

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Saudade is…

According to the Dicionário Houaiss da língua portuguesa, saudade can be described as follows (my translation):

“A somewhat melancholic feeling of incompleteness. It is related to thinking back on situations of privation due to the absence of someone or something, to move away from a place or thing, or to the absence of a set of particular and desirable experiences and pleasures once lived.”

Depending on the context, saudade can relate to the feeling of nostalgia or melancholy (melancolia in Portuguese), in which one feels an interior satisfaction because it is impossible to find something, but one never stops thinking that one is searching for it. It is an incompleteness that one unconsciously wants to never completely resolve.

For further information about this term, please find my other posts about it here and here.

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I list the languages  of the entry in wikipedia in alphabetical order, but a parental order among the languages would have been possible too (i.e. the Bosnian term is similar to an Arabic and Turkish term, but with different meainings. You’ll find them all listed separately).

Albanian:

In Albanian we can find a direct translation of saudade in the word mall. It encompasses feelings of passionate longing, sadness, and at the same time an undefined laughter from the same source. Other variations which give different nuances to this word are: përmallim, përmallje, etc.

Arabic:

In Arabic, the word ??? (wajd) means a state of transparent sadness caused by the memory of a loved one who is not near; it is widely used in ancient Arabic poetry to describe the state of the lover’s heart as he or she remembers the long-gone love. It is a mixed emotion of sadness for the loss, and happiness for having loved that person.

Armenian:

In Armenian, saudade is represented by “karot” (I’m sorry, I couldn’t find the right font to write the armenian term), which describes the deep feeling of missing of something or somebody.

Bosnian:

The Bosnian language has a term for the same type of feeling, sevdah, which comes from the Turkish term sevda (‘love’) via Arabic sawda (‘black’), which in Turkish means “black bile.” In Bosnian language, the term sevdah represents pain and longing for a loved one. Sevdah or sevdalinke (pl) is also a genre of traditional music originating from Bosnia and Herzegovina. It’s a singing about bitterness, sadness, longing and love pain. These songs are very melancholic, emotionally charged and sung with passion and fervor.

English:

In English, the verb “to pine” or ” to long” for somebody, something or some place that you miss deeply, to wish you could be there or have it again. It’s a nostalgic yearning for something that may no longer exist.

Finnish:

In the Finnish language the term kaiho seems to correspond very closely to saudade. It “means a state of involuntary solitude in which the subject feels incompleteness and yearns for something unattainable or extremely difficult and tedious to attain”. Curiously, the sentiment of kaiho is central to the Finnish tango. Kaiho has also religious connotations in Finland, “since the large Lutheran sect called the Awakening (Finnish herännäiset, or körttiläiset more familiarly) consider central to their faith a certain kaiho towards Zion”. Saudade does not involve tediousness. The feeling of saudade rather accentuates itself: “the more one thinks about the loved person or object, the more one feels saudade.”

French:

Saudade relates to the French regret, in which one feels a hard sentiment, but in a nostalgic sense (cfr. in some dictionnaries saudade is described as “sentiment de nostalgie, du regret mélancolique“).

(La Mélancolie, by Lucas Cranach the Elder, 1532)

Galician:

I would like to add another term to the wikipedia list. The Galician morriña. It describes a feeling towards the place/country we come from (“Heimweh” in German), which is very melancholic. This term entered into the Spanish language through the Gallego: “Se utiliza en español en general para describir un sentimiento de tristeza por la lejanía del lugar de donde procede uno y de aquellas cosas, objetos y situaciones que lo evocan.”

German:

One translation of saudade into German is Wehmut (in Dutch weemoed), a form of nostalgia; or Weltschmerz, which is the “general pain caused by an imperfect state of being or state of the world”. Also Sehnsucht comes pretty close to the meaning of saudade. It’s generally translated with “yearning” or “craving” and describes a deep, bittersweet sense of something lost, missing, or unattainable. Sehnsucht can also have a more positive, goal-oriented connotation; “an “aspirational saudade” that may drive one to reclaim, pursue or define the absent something”.

Greek:

The Greek word closest to saudade is ????????? (“nostalgia”). Nostalgia also appears in the Portuguese language as in the many other languages with an Indo-European origin, bearing the same meaning of the Greek word ?????????. There is yet another word that, like saudade, has no immediate translation in English: ??????? (lakhtara). This word encompasses sadness, longing and hope, as does the term saudade.

Hebrew:

In Hebrew, saudade can be translated by Ergah ????, which means yearning/longing/desire coupled with deep sadness.

Indonesian:

The closest word to saudade in Indonesian is galau. It describes a sad feeling or mood that is felt when we miss someone. It is apparently used by the Indonesian youth today [it would be great to have some feedback about this, maybe with some context of its use] and, although the word itself may be caused by various things – such as failing an exam – the most common causes are love-related. The person feeling galau is nostalgic as well. “It can last for hours, but it is almost always temporary.”

Japanese:

In Japan, saudade expresses a concept similar to the Japanese word natsukashii. Although commonly translated as “dear, beloved, or sweet,” “in modern conversational Japanese natsukashii can be used to express a longing for the past.” “It connotes both happiness for the fondness of that memory and goodness of that time, as well as sadness that it is no longer. It is an adjective for which there is no fitting English translation. It can also mean “sentimental,” and is a wistful emotion. The character used to write natsukashii can also be read as futokoro ? [????] and means “bosom,” referring to the depth and intensity of this emotion that can even be experienced as a physical feeling or pang in one’s chest—a broken heart or a heart feeling moved.”

Korean:

In Korean, keurium (???) is probably closest to saudade. “It reflects a yearning for anything that has left a deep impression in the heart—a memory, a place, a person, etc.”

I first heard the Korean word in a Netflix series Crashlanding on you, where in the last episode it is used a very saudade way and perfectly reflects the feeling not only in the scene, but of the whole series…

Mongolian:

In Mongolian, betgerekh (????????) is closest to saudade as it describes the feeling of missing something or someone very deeply. It seems that this term is also used to determine a mental illness.

Romanian:

In the Romanian language, the word dor bears a close meaning to saudade. It means “longing, desire, wanting something” and can also stand for “love” or “desire”, “having a derivation in the noun dorin?? and the verb dori, both of them being translated usually by “wish” and “to wish”.”

Slovenian:

The Slovenian language has many words espressing the feeling of “longing”: hrepeneti, koprneti, pogrešati (literally “to miss someone”), nostalgija, melanholija. The verb koprneti (“to long, yearn or languish for someone or something”) and thereof derived noun koprnenje  (“yearning”) are the closest translations to saudade.

Spanish:

Saudade is often related to the Spanish añorar, which is defined by the Real Academia Española as “remembering [or feeling] with sadness the absence, deprivation or loss of someone or something loved”.

Llamamos saudade a un sentimiento de melancolía motivado por la ausencia de alguien o de alguna cosa, de la lejanía de un lugar, o de la falta de ciertas experiencias ya vividas. Frecuentemente en plural, la palabra se usa en varias situaciones:

– estar com saudades de alguém que vive longe (echar en falta a alguien que vive lejos)

– sentir saudades das ruas da cidade natal(echar en falta las calles de la ciudad natal)

– sentir saudades dos tempos de faculdade (echar en falta los tiempos de la universidad)

etc.

The term can also translate into the Spanish expression echar de menos, or extrañar—roughly equivalent to the Portuguese ter saudades: “missing something or someone”: ter saudades de comer uma boa feijoada (echar en falta comer una buena feijoada)

Tamil:

In wikipedia we can find that “in Tamil, a similar feeling of love-sickness is expressed by the word pasalai.” But I found this description of the term pasalai: Female hysteria (!) “includes symptoms of  faintness, nervousness, insomnia, fluid retention, heaviness in abdomen, muscle spasm, shortness of breath, irritability, loss of appetite for food or sex, and “a tendency to cause trouble”.“

It would be great to have some feedback about the meaning and the use of this term in modern (and ancient) Tamil.

Turkish:

In Turkish, the feeling of saudade is somewhat similar to hüzün, which describe a melancholic feeling popular in art and culture “following the fall of a great empire”. However, hüzün is closer to melancholy and depression in that it is associated with a sense of failure in life and lack of initiative.

Welsh:

Saudade is said to be the only exact equivalent of the Welsh hiraeth and the Cornish hireth. It connotes “homesickness tinged with grief or sadness over the lost or departed”. It is the mix of the longing/yearning/nostalgia/wistfulness feeling.

In wikipedia is also mentioned the Torlak dialect of Bulgarian, “spoken today in the easternmost part of Serbia and the remote southern mountains of Kosovo”. “There is an expression which corresponds more closely to the Japanese and Greek examples, but can be compared to saudade in the broader sense of longing for the past. It is ??? ?? ??????(?) / žal za mlados(t) i.e., “yearning for one’s youth.” [Since the dialect has not been standardised as a written language it has various forms]. The term and the concept have been popularised in standard Serbian through short prose and plays by the fin-de-siècle writer Borisav Stankovi? born in Vranje .

Finally, it is interesting to see that saudade can be found also in Esperanto. It borrows the word directly, changing the spelling to accommodate Esperanto grammar, as sa?dado.

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I presume that there are more languages and dialects to be added to this list and all the terms would need a proper linguistical explanation (context of use etc.). I’m not proficient in (all) the languages listed, therefore I would be very thankful for any comment at the end of the post that could help to know more about those terms in the different languages. – Thank you very much in advance!

What I found very interesting in this tour d’horizon is, that the feeling of saudade, expressed by other terms, inspires musicians in several cultures and that it’s closely related to the general sentiment of fin-de-siècle (but this will be the topic for another post).

Related articles

• Saudade in literature and music (expatsincebirth.com)
• Saudade (edwardpitt.me)
• ‘Saudade’, the untranslatable word for missing something or someone… (3rdculturechildren.com)
• Saudade (forfreepsychology.wordpress.com)
• Saudade (roldeschulte.wordpress.com)