They argued in two languages. It had started as an accident — Yusuf reverting to Arabic when frustrated, Camille reverting to French — and become, over time, a strange and useful ritual.
“You only switch when you know you’re losing,” she told him, in French, mid-disagreement about whose turn it was to call the landlord.
He answered in Arabic, something quick and indignant that she didn’t fully understand but recognized the shape of — denial, mostly, with an edge of wounded pride.
“I don’t know what you just said,” she said, “but I disagree with it.”
“Good. That’s usually accurate.”
They’d been doing this for nine years: arguing across languages neither of them fully shared, somehow understanding each other anyway through tone and history and the specific cadence of being annoyed by someone you love.
What had started as confusion had become its own dialect. A third language, made of both of theirs, that existed only between them.
Their daughter, six now, had started doing the same thing — switching languages mid-tantrum, apparently having absorbed the family pattern before she understood why.
“She gets it from you,” Yusuf said, watching their daughter storm off in indignant Arabic.
“She gets it from us,” Camille corrected. “It’s not a flaw. It’s a language.”
He laughed, his frustration dissolving the way it always did, eventually, into something softer.
“Call the landlord,” he said. “I’ll concede this round.”
“In which language?”
“Either. You’ll understand.”
She kissed his cheek on her way to find the phone, and he watched her go, thinking — not for the first time — that the things that should have divided them had instead become a private, untranslatable proof that they belonged to each other.
✦ Today’s Reflection
Is there a private language, joke, or pattern unique to your relationship that an outsider would never fully understand?
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Sonia M. Rompoti, MSc, Bsc 
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