I’ve recently started watching the Netflix show, Dark Winds, and I was immediately struck by the natural, fluid way the characters navigate their linguistic landscapes. The majority of characters are Navajo. Some are rural farmers who mostly only speak their native languages. But many of the main characters are professionals – police officers, healthcare workers, business people – who navigate complex, high-stakes environments in a number of languages. When they talk about their work, they speak English. When they talk about family, culture, or deep-seated emotions, they switch to Diné, their native language. They don’t apologise for it, and they don’t struggle with it. They simply choose the language that best fits the cognitive load.

Watching this, I realised: This isn’t just a character trait; it is what multilinguals do.

Linguistic identities

Many of these characters have their linguistic identities anchored in more than one language. This is something I relate to as well. The longer I live abroad, the more English takes over in my everyday life (sad but unavoidable). However, when I experience a strong emotion, the first word that comes to mind tends to be in Hungarian. Or, when my children were babies, the nursery rhymes of my childhood came rushing back. However, I struggle to talk to my family about my work. My parents and my sister don’t speak English, so whenever I talk to them about school and the work I do, I struggle to find the right words. This is especially interesting in conversation with my sister who is also an educator herself!

I sometimes feel ashamed of losing my Hungarian but I am trying to reframe that thought: I am not losing anything, I am gaining a new linguistic identity. When I have spent a few days in Hungary, it all comes back. And when I read or listen to academic content in Hungarian, I process it without any difficulties. If I needed to produce academic work in Hungarian right now, it’d be a challenge but it definitely wouldn’t be impossible.

Efficiency Over “Correctness”

I’ve spent my career thinking about how we teach English. But my own life tells a different story. I am bilingual in English and Hungarian (I wrote about it here), and I grew up with a friendship group where we naturally moved between both. We didn’t know the academic terms for “translanguaging” or “code-switching” back then; we just knew that when we were together, we used whichever language was more efficient. We used the word that felt right, the expression that carried the most meaning, or the phrasing that allowed us to articulate a feeling in milliseconds rather than minutes.

To this day, that is how my friends and I talk to each other. We aren’t “mixed up” – we are simply being efficient.

The “Neutral” Territory of Tier 3

In my work with Year 3 students, I’ve found that this same principle applies to academic success. I often see students struggle to find the right English words for complex, Tier 3 academic concepts. But I’ve also realised that just as often they don’t have those words in their home language either, especially when their education has been disrupted.

Instead of viewing this as a deficit, I’ve started to treat Tier 3 academic language as a neutral territory. For concepts like “photosynthesis” or “fractions,” no one’s home language has the home field advantage. At the end of the day, academic language is nobody’s mother tongue so we are all starting at the same baseline.

From Compliance to Contribution

When I shift my classroom to prioritise meaning over English-only compliance, the transformation is immediate.

If a student has a concept locked in their home language, I encourage them to use it. We use simple tools like Google Translate to explore, bridge, and conduct comparative language analysis. By doing this, I’m not just helping them learn English; I’m giving them permission to be as efficient and expressive in my classroom as I am with my own family.

The result isn’t just better English acquisition. It is a willingness to contribute. When students realise that their home language is a respected, legitimate tool for inquiry rather than an obstacle to be overcome, their pride in their ideas skyrockets. They stop waiting for the “perfect” English word and start participating in the construction of knowledge earlier.

Final Thoughts

As educators, our goal must be to show our learners that their entire linguistic repertoire is the most powerful tool they have for success. After all, if we want them to become sophisticated thinkers, we need to let them speak like one, in whichever language fits the moment.