The friction between registers -between the intimate and the analytical, between the embodied and the conceptual -is not a stylistic indulgence but an enactment of the paper's central argument.My language formation has been shaped by a multiplicity of environments that resist easy summary.My grandmother moved between Tatar, Japanese, and Russian in ways that did not announce themselves as code-switching, because the codes themselves were not always clearly distinct.My father, who would later settle in southern Germany, brought into our shared space an English-inflected relationship to language, a mobility that treated linguistic rootedness with a certain pragmatic indifference.Around me, and eventually within me, several languages accumulated, each carrying histories, affects, and normative expectations that did not converge.The question of which among them was my mother tongue was not one I felt equipped to answer, because the question presupposed a kind of singularity and origin that my experience simply did not contain.This paper traces how that experience came to be organised, or rather, how it came to be subjected to successive attempts at organisation, through the ideological force of language categories.It is, in the terms developed below, a genealogy of namelessness.
Mizuki Sakurama-Nakamura (Sun,) studied this question.