At the age of eleven, Saif ur Rehman Raja arrived in Belluno, a city of 35 thousand inhabitants in the Northern part of the Veneto region. He didn’t know a word of Italian;, at first, he used an English-Italian dictionary to help him get through school, learn, interact and make friends. He had to “cut” all connections with his written native language and translated everything. It was a somewhat solitary experience that taught him resilience and creativity, but also left him a little bit isolated, linguistically and culturally.

At Politecnico di Milano's Mantova Campus the series of events dedicated to the “other” mother tongues of Italian authors moves on with Urdu, the official language of Pakistan (along with English). Spoken by at least 90 million people in the world as a mother tongue, Urdu evolved from Sanskrit and has strong vocabulary influences from Arabic and Farsi.

This dual influence means there are situations where both languages provide words for the same concept, such as “mother” and “father”. We learn that the language originated as a literary means of expression; words like sex (as in, sexual intercourse outside marriage) or orgasm are not in the vocabulary and had to be imported from English, but expressing vulgarity is virtually impossible, nonetheless. Poetry is so closely associated with the Urdu language that, it’s perfectly appropriate and even expected of speakers to add some well-known poems to any speech as a short interlude.

It's common for multilinguals to feel they possess different personalities according to the language spoken, and Raja confirms this perception. He can express different things depending on the language he's using; his language and identity is continually shifting.