Language Repertoire as Radical Queer Love

Abstract The present essay is dedicated to the relationship between extreme multilingualism (or a polyglottal language repertoire) and queerness. The author employs an autoethnographic method and revisits a three-month period when he was fifteen years old, focusing on four languages (i.e., French, Arabic, German, and Polish) and a journey that took him across Europe from Western Poland to Paris and back. This reflexive narrative is evaluated through the lens of language biographies/trajectories in the era of superdiversity and mobility, leading to the following conclusion: The author's language acquisition and multilingualism have been reflective of and motivated by his queerness. That is, the author has not acquired his extreme multilingual repertoire and has not learned over forty languages because of education, work, or skills-related needs and aspirations, but because of the love he has felt and made to real and imaginary people. The key element in shaping this queerness-driven polyglotism has been the author's mobility—language being understood as a biographical trajectory that runs across (informal) spaces, emotions, minds, and bodies. The author interprets the above observations within a radical pedagogical approach to education and contends that, to learn languages, we need sensitive lovers rather than (more) teachers and classrooms.