about us




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Me: Annabelle

I would describe my career as that of a chameleon. I trained as a linguist and academic researcher in language acquisition. I worked in academia for over a decade teaching languages and carrying out research in language acquisition in young children. Passionate about evidence-based decision making, multilingualism is my passion. Life and love meant I had to reinvented myself several times (from teacher to stationery maker, designer to writer, content creator and virtual assistant). 
If you want to read more about my own linguistics background, read here.

After years of academic writing, I started this blog in 2011 when our family had just landed for a new life in Germany and when I was facing a complete career and life overall. In 2021, I co-authored How to raise a global citizen: for the parents of the children who will save the world (published by DK). You can get your own copy here.


Our family

We are Europe. We live Europe everyday. Without Europe our family would not be what it it is now. I am Annabelle: a 40-something French passport-holder married to a Portuguese-passport holder. After 13 years in the U.K. (Newcastle upon Tyne) and 10 years in Germany, we moved to Porto, Portugal in the summer of 2021. Our children (Miss and Mr) were born in England and Germany respectively.

Our languages

We use 3 language on a daily basis. We live our life multilingually. We, as parents, mostly speak French to the children (and have always done so). As a couple, we speak English. Our children now attend a French-speaking school in Portugal. Community life is in Portuguese of course, but our little family unit very much relies on English-medium entertainment too. As we lived in Germany, we also all speak German to various levels of fluency.


What we love

In our spare time, we love to cook, travel and eat the world as a family. We love showing different cultures to our children whether it is from the comfort of our sofa or on a plane. Multiculturalism is our family. 


Why the piri-piri lexicon?

The name sums up our family.

Lexicon = the words used in a language or by a person or a group of people. 
I spent 4 years of my student life researching bilingual children's vocabulary development for a PhD and carried on further research on the topic of word acquisition. Lexicon refers to my love of languages but also our multilingual family.

Piri-piri = word originally from the Ronga language of Mozambique meaning pepper.
Piri-piri is a multicultural chili. While its story is laced with that of colonialism (in former Portuguese colonies), it is also a great South African commercial story (Nando’s). It is used in a traditional, delicious and simple Portuguese dish (piri-piri chicken - a family favourite) and represents our family's love for (spicy) food and our love for cooking.

Contact

You can contact us at thepiripirilexicon at gmail dot com.


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