Five Languages, One Voice: Why I Never Felt Smart Enough

I speak five languages. Bengali is the first one — the one I dreamed in as a child, the one I still argue in when I lose my temper. English is the one I built a career in across eleven years of Sydney’s luxury hospitality circuit. French is the one my daughter will grow up in, on this island in the Indian Ocean. Arabic and some Japanese arrived somewhere in between, at bars and airports and kitchens, absorbed the way languages come to people who have always been listening more than talking.

For most of my life, I did not consider this a sign of intelligence.

I considered it noise. Evidence of distraction. Proof that I could not commit to anything long enough to do it properly.

This is what undiagnosed ADHD does to your self-story. It turns your strengths into accusations. You are multilingual? That is because you cannot sit still in one country. You switch between tasks effortlessly? That is because you cannot finish anything.

I was reading books in English when other kids in Chittagong were still sounding out letters. By the time I arrived in Australia at nineteen, I was already fluent. By the time I moved to France’s overseas territory, I had added French to the stack. Languages, for a brain like mine, are not academic exercises. They are survival tools, social camouflage, portals into entirely different modes of being. In French I am more formal, more deliberate. In English I am dry and fast. In Bengali I am the child who never quite grew up.

No school ever told me this was remarkable. What school told me — repeatedly, in three countries — was that I could not concentrate and I did not finish things.

Both were true. Neither was the full picture.

Here is what I know now that I did not know then: multilingualism and ADHD often share a brain. The same hyperfocus that makes sustained attention in a quiet classroom impossible makes total immersion in a new language irresistible. The same restlessness that burned through semesters makes a packed service floor feel like a natural habitat.

I am not smart despite my ADHD. I am multilingual because of it.

That is not a consolation prize. That is the actual prize.

I just had to learn to name it correctly.

Sourov Deb is a multilingual educator and writer based in La Réunion. He teaches English and writes about language, identity and neurodiversity.