This week’s blog post includes a linked audio file. Just click on the link below if you would like to hear the post read aloud. Scroll down to read the text.

After just a little over a year of doing research on plurilingual practices and identities of second language (L2) speakers, I can’t seem to “un-see” it anymore. By it I mean the various forms of plurilingualism with which L2 users engage every day. Here in Montréal for instance, my friends and I would commonly code-switch between English and French as we see fit, while also consuming (literally!) bits and pieces of Mandarin, Japanese, Punjabi, Italian, Spanish, and other languages every time we find ourselves in the many ethnic restaurants that have found a home on the island of Tiohtià:ke.

More recently, I also had the chance to speak a lot of Tagalog during a fellow Filipino friend’s visit from Toronto. It was quite exciting and surprising since I never use Tagalog here! Indeed, I’ve never really seen Tagalog as something that is a part of my plurilingual reality when I’m in Montréal. But the hotter tea is this: it took my friend and me no time at all to find ourselves in a nostalgic space as we started to plurilingually engage in English, Tagalog, and… Filipino gay lingo or swardspeak!