The Language as Home and Passage

Some people see language as nothing more than a tool — a means to communicate, to buy bread, ask for directions, write an email. But those who inhabit language more slowly — and perhaps more reverently — know it is much more than that. Language is home, but it is also a path. It is both shelter and passage. It is where we are, and where we become.

Learning a new language has always felt to me like opening another window in the soul. And as a teacher, I see how each student, when approaching a new language, is not merely acquiring vocabulary — they are subtly reshaping their interior. Because every foreign tongue is, at first, a kind of exile. You stand before sounds you don’t command, structures that question your thoughts. But gradually, the foreign becomes familiar. What was exile becomes shelter. What was passage becomes home.

Our mother tongue is where we live without thinking. A second or third language is where we learn to live attentively. With every new verb, each mastered preposition, we tailor the garment of a new self. The language shifts from mere tool to extension of the body, an echo of our attention.

That is why I speak of "linguistic tailoring" — for it is not about forcing everyone into the same shape, but creating, with each learner, a space designed to fit them, where language is not imposed but discovered, adjusted, inhabited. Each person has a way of thinking, of breathing, of listening. And language must adjust to that for the process to be not just efficient, but beautiful.

As a translator and philologist, I know language is never neutral. It carries worlds, histories, ways of seeing. To translate is to walk between homes. To teach is to offer maps — maps with blank margins, where the learner can draw their own geography.

Fragmentos do Verbo was born from this understanding: language is not just what we say — it is who we become when we say it. And so, learning a language is not a goal, but a way of crossing, of expanding, of dwelling more consciously in ourselves.

Language is a bridge. But it is also a shore.