Deutsche Welle this week invited several strangers inhabiting strange lands (geographical or linguistical) to share their experience of being in several places and various languages at once:

* An Algerian thinking in/of Russian

* A Chadian talking about Arabic

* A Russian/Benin women just at ease in French, English and Russian

and…

* A ‘Franco-British transplant in Ethiopia…’ (at minute 13 for those of you in a hurry, and IN FRENCH only for those of you not that way inclined).

You can listen to the whole podcast ‘L’apprentissage des langues, un richesse, un défi.’

Our Stranger in Ethiopia pedantically mentions the German sociologist Georg Simmel and his concept of the stranger (first used in his 1908 essay “Exkurs über den Fremden”), as being ‘in the group, but not of the group.’ You can read more about that idea here and here.