In my mid-teens I spent a few summer weeks in beautiful Brittany on a school exchange. My classmates and I exchanged more than grammar lessons with our French peers, swearwords being among the most popular items of cross-cultural education. I eagerly tried out these new swears, but my awareness of their social nuances remained crude – partly because the internet hadn’t happened yet.

As the years passed and my fluency in French (and German) declined with disuse, I seldom resorted to their swears – the emotional gratification was limited, and I didn’t feel authentic enough: I had im-fucking-postor syndrome. But I never forgot the feeling of swearing in a foreign tongue, the impish appeal of going native with these second-hand taboos. The phenomenon is especially interesting because swearing, linguistically speaking, is neurologically unusual.

Which brings us to multilingualism.

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