In a world dominated by the English language, native speakers get a head start. They have better access to education and career opportunities; are unburdened by the mental acrobatics required when speaking a second language; and can travel the world without ever opening a grammar book. Most of all, perhaps, they experience language learning as a choice rather than an obligation.

English has been the language of international culture for decades, but social media has broadened its reach, and relying exclusively on English is becoming easier. Even in places like Paris, a city famously hostile to English speakers, things are changing. Ordering at the bakery is no longer the ordeal it used to be, nor is it unusual for waiters to reply in flawless English.

Yet for all its advantages, there is at least one downside to growing up speaking the world’s lingua franca. In Olga Tokarczuk’s award-winning novel Flights, the unnamed narrator points out how, in an increasingly Anglophone world, native speakers have no private language of their own: “It’s hard to imagine, but English is their real language! Oftentimes, their only language…. How lost they must feel in the world, where all instructions, all the lyrics of all the stupidest possible songs, all the menus, all the excruciating pamphlets and brochures—even the buttons in the elevator!—are in their private language.”

When English belongs to everyone, monolingual Anglophones are deprived of the thrill of having a private conversation in public. They have one tool—one personality even—for the entire world. Meanwhile, the polyglot is a chameleon, able to shift from one culture to another. Studies have long shown the cognitive benefits of speaking more than one language, but psychologists have also shown that it can affect how we process and express emotions. English is for politely declining an invitation. The mother tongue is for saying “I love you.”