The People We Never Really Know
by Ruba Zeidan
Somewhere in London, a woman is considered rather quiet. Her colleagues find her pleasant, polite, perhaps a little reserved. She rarely interrupts, she laughs at the right moments, and contributes sensible observations when asked. Nobody dislikes her. Nobody finds her particularly interesting either.
What they don't know is that, in another language, she is hilarious. Back home, she can hold an entire dinner table hostage with a story. She has a gift for imitation, a wicked sense of humour, and an extraordinary talent for turning an innocent remark into an argument that lasts until midnight. Her friends accuse her of talking too much. Her family sometimes wishes she would stop.
Her English is perfectly adequate. Her personality simply hasn't made the journey.
The trouble with language is that we assume it carries the person along with the words. Learn enough vocabulary, master the grammar, acquire a reasonable accent, and eventually the real individual will emerge.
But a language is not a suitcase. You cannot simply pack your personality into it and expect everything to arrive intact. Take humour, for instance. In Arabic, I might turn to a friend who has just said something outrageously funny and exclaim, يخرب بيتك! (yikhrab beitak!) Literally, I have wished destruction upon their home. In the right company, with the right expression, this is practically a declaration of affection. Try translating that into English at a dinner party. Before you have finished explaining the cultural context, someone may be considering whether to call the police.
The problem is not vocabulary. It is timing, intimacy, shared memories, and the dozens of invisible agreements that allow people to understand what we mean when we say something entirely different. A joke that takes three seconds in Arabic may require thirty seconds of explanation in English. By then, the joke is dead, the conversation has moved on, and you are left wondering why you bothered. So you smile. And someone concludes that you are shy.
There is a strange injustice in this, because nobody thinks they are making a judgement about language. They think they are making a judgement about character. A hesitant speaker appears uncertain. A person who searches for words may be mistaken for someone searching for thoughts. We can recognise the unfairness of this intellectually and still fall into the same habit at the next meeting or dinner.
Language does not merely limit what we can express. It can also change what we feel able to express.
I notice this when moving between Arabic and English. Certain emotions become easier to examine in English, as though the slight distance between myself and the words gives me room to think. In Arabic, a familiar expression can carry years of affection, irritation, or mischief without needing a single explanation.
An argument can also change character. In one language, I may find myself choosing careful, measured sentences. In another, disagreement comes with gestures, interruptions, exaggerated indignation, and the occasional affectionate insult. Everyone speaks at once, nobody listens for very long, and somehow everybody understands.
None of this means one version is more authentic than the other. A person may even welcome the change. Someone who grew up surrounded by expectations may find unexpected freedom in another language. The shy daughter becomes the outspoken colleague. The dutiful son discovers sarcasm. A woman who has always struggled to speak about love finds that three borrowed words come surprisingly easily.
A new language can conceal parts of us while allowing others to emerge. The words do not simply describe us. They help shape the person doing the describing. And this has consequences far beyond social awkwardness.
Picture a mother attending a school meeting in a country where she has not yet mastered the language. She listens carefully, searching for the right words. Her answers are brief. She struggles to explain something important about her child, then settles for a simpler sentence. Her daughter, sitting beside her, grows impatient and offers to translate. The teacher sees a hesitant woman. The daughter sees a mother who needs help.
Neither has encountered the woman who, in another language, can settle family disputes, tell magnificent stories, and reduce her sisters to helpless laughter with a single observation. The daughter may hear that woman occasionally, speaking on the telephone to relatives in another country. She recognises the voice, but not quite the person using it.
To be known by your own child through the language in which you are least yourself.
We spend so much time worrying about what children lose when they do not learn their parents' language. We talk about heritage, belonging, and cultural identity. But we rarely consider what they may lose of their parents. A mother can become less funny, less authoritative, less intellectually adventurous in the eyes of the very people who know her most intimately. Not because she has changed, but because they have access to only part of her.
This is not limited to immigrant families. Consider international friendships, multilingual workplaces, marriages conducted largely in one partner's language. We grow close to people while knowing only the version of them available to us. It is rarely the whole story.
And it raises an uncomfortable question: how confidently should we claim to know anyone?
The responsibility for being understood almost always falls on the person speaking the unfamiliar language. Improve your pronunciation. Find the right expression. Learn the jokes. Adjust your tone. Speak more confidently.
What about the person listening? Imagine a meeting in which someone pauses, searching for a word. A colleague helpfully interrupts: “What she means is…” and supplies a smoother, simpler version of the thought. Everyone nods. The meeting continues. Nothing particularly unkind has happened. He may genuinely believe he has helped. But somewhere in that small exchange, the speaker has lost ownership of her own idea.
A better listener might allow the silence to last a few seconds longer. Rather than completing the sentence, they might ask a question about the argument itself. They could resist the temptation to interpret hesitation as uncertainty, or fluency as evidence of intellectual superiority. These are small acts, hardly heroic. Yet they require something we are often reluctant to surrender: the confidence of our first impressions.
We are accustomed to thinking that understanding someone is the speaker's achievement. They explain themselves clearly, and we understand. If communication fails, we look for what they could have said differently.
But understanding is also something the listener creates. The questions we ask, the interruptions we make, the assumptions we carry into a conversation can determine how much of another person we ever get to meet. We will never catch every joke or recognise every shade of meaning. The more realistic ambition is not to understand everyone completely, but to become less certain that we already do.
The next time someone seems unusually quiet to you, it may be worth resisting the urge to decide that quietness is part of their character. They may have been translating themselves all evening, editing out the jokes that would take too long, the stories that require too much explanation, and the thoughts that deserve better words.
So they smile.
And somewhere behind that polite smile is a joke you will never hear.
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