Meno asked me today "would you read books in English or Swedish? "
" English,always " I replied. "Swedish only when I must". English is definitely my emotional language and more important to me than anyone realises. It is partly why I am here in Blogland U.K. and not in Sweden. Even some of my relationships here are English speaking ones. Initially , my Swedish friends would speak to me in English , but as I became fluent in Swedish , that changed. . I insisted ; “ If you want to know the real me I must speak to you in English , otherwise our relationship will not deepen. “. Now some speak to me in Swedish and I answer in English. Sometimes we speak Swenglish.
I have some old friends that insist on speaking to me in Latvian and these friendships do not deepen. One by one they fall to the wayside and I let them go because for me it is not enough. We also have different beliefs. For them preserving developing and maintaining the Latvian language comes very high on their list of priorities , whereas for me it is not.
I am the daughter of Latvian refugees, born and raised in Yorkshire in the U.K. many moons ago. For the first five years of my life all I heard and spoke was Latvian and I still speak Latvian with my mother and her friends.
At the the age of 5 I started school and a whole new world opened up to me. MY life began as an individual. This was when my identity started to form- - me , in my own right. Since then all my education has been in English and I learned to express myself in English.
At school I learned French from the age of 11 and later, after college , I spent a year living and working in France. Then, in the mid 70s I came to Sweden and have been here ever since.
Am I Swedish ? No , not at all. Am Latvian ? No, though a part of me undeniably is. Am I English ? I doubt it, not any more after all these years , though you cannot erase the Yorkshire in me.
I think of myself as a multidimensional limitless being with a great need for communication and self – expression, sharing and interacting across the boundaries of nationality, and religious beliefs and other limiting boundaries.To fly free is what I’ve always wanted. Free from dogma. Free from the restrictions of a culture or faith. or tradition. Free from authority.Free to be .. but then another question arises Free to be what ? That's another story 
To answer my friend Meno's question, I read mainly in English. Although I understand and speak Swedish fluently - When I read a text in a language other than English and it will not fully reach me emotionally . It will not resonate with my very core. " Jag älskar Dig, is not the same as " I love you ". It has another vibration, another emotional meaning.
Something is always missing and lacking in other languages. There are also words and expressions in each language that I understand and do not translate very well into other language. The essence is somehow missing , like an itch you cannot quite reach to scratch.
I have not fully resolved this issue of language and identity. I’d better stop here for now.
