English, for all its swaggering vocabulary and magpie-like talent for acquisition, is still surprisingly inarticulate in some corners of human experience. Despite being the unofficial global language of tech, diplomacy, and small talk about the weather, it fails us when we need it most — like when we want to describe the specific melancholy of a sunny afternoon that reminds us of a place we've never been. Other languages, meanwhile, have words for that. (See: “sehnsucht” in German.) These untranslatable words don’t just add flair to our Instagram captions — they expose the soft underbelly of English: a language excellent at commerce, less so at nuance.
Take the Portuguese word “saudade,” a famously untranslatable term often described as “nostalgic longing.” But this translation misses the word’s ghostly poetry — its blend of grief, sweetness, and quiet ache. It’s not just missing someone. It’s missing someone with the knowledge that you may never see them again, and loving that sadness anyway. English can attempt a clunky substitute (“bittersweet yearning”?), but the inefficiency of our attempt points to a deeper problem: English often needs a paragraph to do what another language does in a breath.
Or consider “iktsuarpok,” an Inuit word for the restlessness felt when waiting for someone to arrive — so much so that you keep going outside to check. There's no English equivalent because, presumably, English-speaking cultures haven’t found it necessary to name the anxious pacing that precedes a first date or a late pizza delivery. But of course, we’ve felt it. That’s the point. These words don’t invent emotions; they unveil them — affording recognition to sensations we assumed were too niche or too silly to matter.
This linguistic gap isn’t just romantic — it’s political. When you lack the words to name certain feelings, you also lack the tools to talk about them, process them, or demand accountability for them. For example, the Korean word “han” refers to a collective, inherited sorrow — a cultural grief compounded by history, oppression, and silence. This word is millenia old, compared to the similar American term 'generational trauma' which only began to emerge in the late 1960s. Sometimes, not having the right word means not having the right frame — and that can be dangerous.
Why do we need these words, then? Not just to sound clever at dinner parties (although, yes, tsundoku — the Japenese word for buying books and letting them pile up unread — is excellent for that). We need them because our emotional lives are larger than our current vocabulary allows. To borrow words from other languages is to admit we are incomplete. It’s to concede, humbly, that our inner lives might be richer if we let other cultures help us name them.
Of course, not every borrowed word lands. Some become sanitized, overused, or detached from their original depth — think “hygge” (a Danish word for cozy contentment) turning into a lifestyle trend featuring scented candles. But when done thoughtfully, linguistic borrowing is an act of expansion, not theft. It’s about adding more colors to the crayon box, more dials to the emotional dashboard. If language shapes thought (and it does), then more language means more thought — deeper, sharper, kinder.
So let’s make room on our tongues and timelines for the beautiful, the baffling, the words that have traveled far to meet us. We need “ya’arburnee” (Arabic: may you bury me, a declaration of overwhelming love). We need “kilig” (Tagalog: the fluttery feeling of romantic excitement). And we need the humility to recognize that the English language, for all its power, still has so much left to learn.