Alphabet Soup collects the sayings of two multilingual girls as written down by their poet father. As their Turkish-German-Russian-American family moves from New York to Berlin, the girls communicate in a witty and colorful language of their own, effortlessly mixing words of different origin. Does who we are determine the way we speak — or is it the other way around? Alphabet Soup shows us the girls’ language as it changes, letting us witness their metamorphoses from toddlers to teenagers.
With an essay and poems by the author.
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Praise
“A marvelous book! Language is itself a poet: this is something that children know (as do some poets).”
— Yoko Tawada, author of Exophony: Voyages Outside the Mother Tongue.
“A delightful collection of mixed-language creations that will resonate with parents raising bilingual kids.”
— Aneta Pavlenko, author of The Bilingual Mind: And What it Tells Us about Language and Thought.
Publication Details
Edited by Elina Alter, Ainsley Morse, and Yasha Klots
Trade paperback
First edition, first printing
ISBN: 979-8-9916623-3-8
270 pp, 105 x 148 mm
Publication date: April 15, 2026