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It always starts with a patient. Or patients. They march straight into my thoughts as soon as they enter my office, and refuse to leave ever after, even when in the physical world they are already long gone. Not only that, they tend to alter my lived world. It would certainly be easier if they rearranged my office furniture instead.
One thing that each of them transforms is my speech. I have two working languages, English and Russian, fully developed as such, honed into precise professional tools, each steeped in the wealth of corresponding social, historical, and cultural discourse. I can also recognize some French and Hebrew, and that's about it.
Nevertheless patients of mine manage to bring into being their very own, very specific enriched version of my “language-instrument.” It is never the same again, even if it is technically pure English, or pure Russian. More often than not, however, it is a mix that might include both, as well as words and phrases from a third one, usually the patient's mother tongue, which as they find their way into our discourse necessarily acquire new lived meanings, while the patient and I struggle to render their old meanings intelligible to both of us in the new context. Sometimes, usually when the patient's mother tongue is utterly dissimilar to both of mine, it is experienced directly only by the patient, and is conveyed to me either through sounds, or renditions, or both, floating then around us like a multicolored maternal shadow.
Hope's1 first language is Kirghiz, of which I have only a vague general idea, but by a twist of fate her second language, acquired at the age of six, is Russian, and her third, learned as a grown-up, in which she is also fluent, is English. At the beginning we decide on Russian as the language of our work, and proceed in that tongue, sometimes interspersing it with English expressions for the notions that it does not provide. The solution works well enough, though I am fully aware of my enormous disadvanta