For the inaugural entry in the Ever-Shifting Lexicon, I had the honor of talking to Eugenia Triantafyllou from Athens, Greece, author of fabulously weird stories like "The Giants of the Violet Sea" and "My Country is a Ghost". Eugenia's fiction has been nominated for the Ignyte, Nebula and World Fantasy Awards.
SH: Tell me about your multilingual background. How did you end up writing in your third language?
ET: I was born and raised in Greece. Greek is my first language. But because my mother had been an immigrant in Belgium for almost two decades before she had me, she insisted that I learn French as soon as possible in case we needed to move back. She ended up teaching toddler me with pictures from magazines since I couldn’t yet read or write in any language. Then at school we were taught English and French, and that would make English my third language chronologically, but currently the one I am speaking with the best proficiency, besides Greek.
As an adult I moved to Sweden to be with my partner (Not Belgium! Who knew?) and I was taught Swedish at the school for adults, which helps immigrants learn basic Swedish to be able to work and study as fast as possible. I got all the way to a graduate level with Swedish. The fact that I lived in Sweden helped a lot of course. That would make Swedish my fourth language. My college degree is in Tourism and Hospitality, which meant we had courses with Italian, German, Russian and Turkish (of which I remember almost nothing). That is more or less my history of multilingualism.