Bilingualism at First Hand... The Original

This is my first post on 'BILINGUALISM'. (well, since it became my research project, anyway!)

As I said before, I am bilingual. Even though i was born in Serbia, English was my first language. I never went to a Serbian school; I went to an American school in Serbia, 5 seconds away from my house. Age 6 we moved to Austria (International school), then came to London aged 7.

So I have been speaking English and Serbian my whole life. I speak English better than Serbian; I'm guessing that's because I have been studying in English my whole life. My Serbian is fluent but I find I am sometimes lost for words and revert to English. The funny thing is that I found a book from when I lived in austria and the english is so funny; i am learning it and its all wrong... like 'I mejd' (I made) I dunno! It's funny to think that I once spoke Serbian better! hhaha.

As I said, I feel neither here nor there, accepted 'fully' by neither culture. The reason I mention this is because I have been researching, reading the book Third Culture Children and it talks about this stuff, about being in the middle. So I learned to accept it, but I must admit the older I get, the more I want to belong to Serbia, the more I wanna know about it, the history, the people, I want first hand experience.. so I've decided I need to live there a bit and maybe one day I will feel like I belong. I came across terms such as 'BILINGUALIST', 'MONOLINGUALIST', 'SEMI LINGUALIST' and I thought it was funny, interesting the way they group people. I thought it would make an interesting idea to integrate into our play, ridiculous 'labels', seems they've completely separated them.

Anyway, my first post is just about my own experiences as a bilingualist :) Stay tuned for some interesting facts and figures about the little thing called love.. i mean, bilingualism!

Dana Karic