The Intercultural Glossary
Key Concepts on Expat Parenting and Identity
These are the ideas that run through everything I write.
If you are new here, start with these. Each one names something most people have been living without language for. If you have been here a while, this is where they all live together.
If you have ever stood somewhere, physically or otherwise, and felt like you did not know what game was being played, at least one of these is probably about you.
A
Alter-Globalisation
noun
The movement of communities actively organising around the protection of local identity, economy, and culture in response to the homogenising pressure of global capitalism. Not anti-globalisation exactly. More like: we want to be part of the world without losing what makes us specific.
Appears in the conversation about grief, nostalgia, and why low-rise jeans came back.
D
Demarketing
noun
The strategy of reaching fewer people more honestly rather than more people more loudly. In practice: pricing books so the person who most needs them can afford them, publishing real numbers including the ones that are not impressive, and trusting that the right reader will find the work without a campaign telling the algorithm to show it to her.
The opposite of a funnel. The opposite of urgency. The opposite of following you around the internet.
I have two marketing degrees. I am choosing not to use them the way I was taught. The demarketing experiment is documented in real time in the Marketing Underdog series.
Read the Demarketing experiment →
Distributed Mentorship
noun
The model of learning from a network of people who each contribute something different, from different fields, different contexts, different disciplines, rather than relying on a single mentor who holds the whole map. Named in a conversation with Rhoda Bangerter. Confirmed by a Swiss diplomat. Traced back to Homer, via a seventeenth century French novelist.
E
Epistemic Humility
noun
The willingness to acknowledge that your knowledge is incomplete, that your perspective is shaped by your experience, and that being wrong is not a failure but information. In intercultural contexts, epistemic humility is not the same as agreeing with everyone who challenges you. It is letting the challenge land before deciding what to do with it. The discomfort of being challenged is not evidence that the challenge was wrong. It is evidence that it arrived close enough to matter.
F
Face Theory
noun
The sociological concept developed by Erving Goffman describing the social image we present and the sense of dignity, competence, and legitimacy we try to maintain in interaction. When someone challenges your intellectual position they are not only questioning the argument. They are, however unintentionally, threatening the face of the person who made it. Politeness theory, developed by Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson around the concept of face, shows that almost every social interaction involves navigating that threat, giving it, receiving it, softening it, or ignoring it. The social cost of being wrong is not culturally neutral.
Read the full essay on Face Theory →
Familismo
noun
A core cultural value documented across Latin American communities, describing a strong sense of loyalty, reciprocity, responsibility, and emotional connection that extends well beyond the immediate family. The orientation toward the collective. The cousin who knows someone. The neighbour who brings food. The stranger who gives you the number you need before you know you need it.
Research suggests this is one reason why immigrant communities tend to build such strong informal support networks. The person who arrived before you remembers what it felt like not to know. So they tell you what they know.
Read the full essay on Familismo →
Family Capsule
noun
The portable version of your family's identity. The stories, the objects, the rituals, the language, the food, the specific way you do Sunday, that travels with you when everything else changes. It is what keeps a family coherent across countries, languages, and school systems.
Not nostalgia. Infrastructure. The child who has a family capsule arrives somewhere new already knowing who she is at home, which makes the work of learning who she is in the new place significantly more manageable.
G
Global Professionalism
noun
A term used to describe a set of professional behaviours and norms presented as universal standards for the international workplace. The term deserves scrutiny because there is no global meeting room where everyone agreed on the correct way to behave. What is often called global professionalism reflects the professional culture of the organisations and countries that got to write the rulebook first, predominantly from the Global North. Competitive disadvantage in navigating those norms is different from a hierarchy of values. As Renata Takacura put it: competitive disadvantage is different from a hierarchy of values.
I
Identity Migration
noun
The process of becoming someone different in a place that was not built for you, while still being measured by the old version of yourself. It does not announce itself. It just happens. Sometimes faster in your children than in you.
Not a breakdown. Not a failure to adapt. What happens when context changes faster than identity can keep up. The experience of almost every parent raising children across countries, cultures, or major life transitions.
The word mentor travelled three thousand years and changed meaning along the way. Identity migration is what that process looks like from the inside.
Read the full essay on Identity Migration →
Identity Preservation
noun
The active work of knowing who you are clearly enough that difference does not destabilise you. Not rigidity but security. The psychological infrastructure that makes pluralism possible.
The person who knows who they are can be in the room with someone who is visibly different without experiencing it as a threat. The person who does not know who they are cannot afford that openness because difference feels like an accusation.
This may be why the hostility toward migrants and outsiders visible in so many countries right now is less about economics and more about identity fragility in host populations. People who cannot tell you who they are can tell you very clearly who they are not.
Read the full essay on Identity Preservation →
Inherited Scorecard
noun
The set of expectations you absorbed before you were old enough to question them, still running in the background of a life that no longer fits them. It measures you against a version of yourself that made sense somewhere else, in a different country, before children, before everything changed shape.
It tells you who you were supposed to be. The professional. The competent one. The person people called when they needed something done. In the new country, in the new language, in the new role of parent without a village, the scorecard does not match the life you are actually living.
Naming it is the first step to stopping it from running unchecked. It does not disappear when you name it. But you can see it. And seeing it means you can stop being measured by it without your consent.
The Brazilian birthday superstition is a very small and very specific version of the inherited scorecard.
H
Hedonic Adaptation
noun
The psychological process by which people become accustomed to changes in their circumstances, positive or negative, until the new circumstance becomes the baseline. The promotion stops feeling like a promotion. The new country stops feeling new. The robot vacuum stops feeling like a luxury and starts feeling like infrastructure. For expats, hedonic adaptation has a specific texture: the extraordinary life you moved to becomes ordinary faster than you expected, and the baseline you carried from home came along in the carry-on.
L
Linguistic Capital
noun
A concept developed by sociologist Pierre Bourdieu describing language as a form of capital that carries value in social and professional contexts. Not all languages carry equal weight in all rooms. The language you speak, the accent you carry, and the fluency you demonstrate can open or close doors independently of the content of what you are saying. For immigrant parents, the language of the home and the language of the new country rarely carry equal prestige, and that asymmetry shapes everything from school gate conversations to job interviews to whether a doctor takes you seriously.
Read the full essay on Loss of Linguistic Capital →
Loss of Felt Competence
noun
Not the loss of ability but the loss of the feeling of it. The invisible layer of knowing that tells you what to do next, which queue to join, which word to use, how loud is too loud in a pharmacy, disappears when you move to a place that was not built for you. You are still capable. You just cannot feel it anymore.
The shopping cart was the first place I felt it. I had bought groceries hundreds of times. In Switzerland I stood in the aisle and could not find what I was looking for and could not ask for help in a language I did not yet speak and the gap between what I was doing and what it felt like to do it was enormous.
That gap has a name. This is it.
It is not only for immigrants and expats. The new mother standing in her own kitchen not knowing what to cook for dinner. The person who changed careers and feels like a newcomer in their own field. The parent whose child has grown somewhere they cannot follow. Any major context change can produce it.
M
Minority Status as Relational
noun
Minority status is not a fixed property of a person but a relational one, shaped by the context, the room, the country, and the system doing the categorising. A white Brazilian woman in Brazil may not experience minority status in any meaningful way. The same woman abroad may experience it through her accent, her passport, her name, or her way of reading a room that does not match the room she is standing in. The category changes when the context changes. This is one of the most consistently surprising discoveries for people who move countries.
N
Negative Identity
noun
Defining yourself by exclusion rather than by content. Knowing what you are not before you know what you are. What happens when the positive version of identity has eroded or was never fully built.
The person operating from negative identity cannot accommodate difference because the only stable ground they have is the boundary between themselves and whoever they are not. They know exactly who does not belong because belonging elsewhere is the only identity they have left.
P
Prestige Asymmetry Between Languages
noun
The unequal social value assigned to different languages in a given context. When a parent speaks a minority language at home and a dominant language in public, those two languages do not carry equal weight in the rooms she moves through. The dominant language signals belonging and competence. The heritage language can signal foreignness or distance from the mainstream even when the speaker is equally fluent in both. That asymmetry is not about the languages themselves. It is about the power structures that decide which languages count.
Read the full essay on Prestige Asymmetry Between Languages→
R
Reverse Culture Shock
noun
The disorientation experienced when returning to a place you once called home after living abroad for an extended period. The home that was supposed to feel like home feels slightly off. The people you love are exactly the same and you are not. You adapted without noticing and now the original context no longer fits the person you became inside it. Hedonic adaptation does not only happen in the new country. It happens in the relationship between who you were when you left and who you are when you try to go back.
S
Social Mirrors
noun
The people and systems that reflect back a legible version of who you are. Your job title. Your professional reputation. The community that knows your name and your story. The language you do not have to translate before you speak it.
When you move countries, the mirrors disappear. The version of you that was visible and legible in one context becomes invisible in another. Rebuilding the mirrors is not vanity. It is the specific work of reconstructing a self that can be seen.
Concept developed by Renata Takacura, global career consultant, Chapter 16 of Parenting Unpacked.
Read the full essay on Social Mirrors →
Surface Area of Luck
noun
The idea that luck is not random. It is the product of doing multiplied by telling. The more you make and the more honestly you document making it, the more surface area you create for luck to land on.
Germany showing up three times without being asked. The United Kingdom pre-ordering before the book existed. The United States arriving with eleven copies in one IngramSpark report. Amazon Brasil bestseller without a single campaign targeting Brazil. None of that was planned. All of it was surface area.
U
Unspoken Rule
noun
The implicit pressure to dissolve into a new context rather than adapt to it. Nobody says it out loud. Nobody needs to. If you want to belong here, you need to become someone more like them.
There is a version of this that is right. Learning the local way, respecting the context, understanding the codes. But there is a version that goes too far. When it goes too far it starts to feel wobbly and not real, like wearing a version of yourself that fits the room but does not fit you.
The difference between adapting and dissolving is a thread. Knowing what you are adapting from, knowing what you are bringing into the room, knowing what belongs to you and what belongs to the context. When you have that thread, who someone else is does not bother you.