It began as an obsession: I would raise my son bilingual if it killed me.

Growing up as an Egyptian expatriate in Kuwait, I always felt out of place. Moving to Britain with my family following the Iraqi invasion, while I was still in primary school, compounded my sense of dislocation. But the Egyptian Arabic dialect always helped me connect to my heritage, no matter where I happened to live.

I couldn’t imagine my son, who is now almost 3, never picking up the characteristic Egyptian sense of humor, or memorizing the phrases from popular Egyptian comedies that roll off our tongues like well-worn metaphors. If these cultural references, which usually reduce in translation, could be ingrained in my son’s vernacular, they would help to shape his thought and personality, just as they had mine — even though he’d be growing up thousands of miles away from his Egyptian extended family. In short: I wanted my British-born son to feel like part of the gang.

[Do children soak up language like sponges? The science is more complicated.]

Roughly 25 miles northeast of Cambridge, the town where my son’s English father and I are raising him is not known for its diversity. Over the years I’ve spent living in Britain, I’ve met many Arab parents whose children speak only rudimentary Arabic, so the possibility that my first-born could lose my mother tongue felt like a serious risk.

My husband refused to succumb to my ominous visions of our son’s native languages being capped at one. He pointed out that many of my British-born Egyptian friends understand Arabic, even if they don’t speak it fluently. Still, I was adamant that our son should feel fully at home in Arabic as well as English.

When my son was born, I was thrilled to find an Arabic-language baby and toddler group in nearby Cambridge. Every Sunday morning, we went along and sang songs in Arabic — some traditional and some translated versions of English nursery rhymes.

I soon became friends with the founder, Saussan Khalil, another Egyptian who was brought up between Britain and the Middle East before settling in Cambridge with her family. After searching in vain for informal play-based sessions that would encourage her toddler daughter’s understanding of spoken Arabic, Saussan established Kalamna (“our words,” in Arabic), which offers a range of children’s language classes.

Unlike most languages, Arabic exists in a number of forms. The so-called Modern Standard Arabic, which is similar to classical or Quranic Arabic, is today mostly used in news reporting, literature and formal communication. The spoken dialects are unique to each country or region, their vocabulary infused with historical influence. Moroccan Arabic is threaded with French and Berber words, for example, Egyptian Arabic with Turkish words, and so on.

I quickly discovered that teaching my son to speak Egyptian Arabic would be complicated, and not only because we didn’t live in Egypt. My husband, who spent some time in the Gulf when he was young, had picked up the Omani dialect of Arabic. To avoid clunky and often comical communication, we mostly speak to each other in English at home. We decided to use the one-parent-one-language approach with our son, while allowing my husband to sometimes speak Arabic to him, too. But we often bickered over “correct” wording, with my husband arguing that Omani Arabic was probably closer to the “official” Modern Standard. Not wishing to confuse our son even more, I insisted that the priority was for him to learn to speak in Egyptian dialect with my extended family.

When I struggled to find books to read to my son in our colloquial dialect, Saussan introduced me to Reem Makhoul, a Palestinian former journalist who became a children’s book publisher after a fruitless search for books in colloquial Arabic to share with her young daughter. Even for children, most Arabic books are published in formal standard Arabic, or fusha. But for children growing up in countries where they hardly hear any Arabic at all, that’s like teaching them to run before they can walk.

In 2015, Reem and her Irish husband, a former New York Times reporter, set up a publishing house called Ossass Stories, producing books for children, like their own, in the Palestinian dialect of Reem’s heritage. Like Kalamna, Reem’s business has been very successful because demand is high, and she has since expanded into other dialects, including Egyptian.

When I asked Reem why she invested so much in this business, she insisted that the risk to her children’s future was higher. “Our language is our identity,” Reem said. “It’s not just our identity; it’s our roots, our culture; it’s our music, our food. It’s everything. Especially colloquial Arabic, it’s the language of our everyday life, it’s what connects us to this place, to this land, to our parents.”

I was beginning to understand what had drawn me to the Arabic children’s sessions. While I had struggled to come to terms with my identity as an Egyptian and then a naturalized British citizen, my son would have his own identity issues to deal with, being both English and Egyptian by blood. Not only did the other Kalamna children also speak his other, “foreign” language, many of them also happened to be biracial. The contrast of my son’s pale skin against his dark locks was nothing compared to the blond curls of many of these children, who shared his part-Arab part-Caucasian parentage. With time, I realized that what I had also been craving was for my son to feel that he belonged, in both worlds.

Just like in our other playgroups, I nestled my son in my lap as we clapped and crooned, then oohed and aahed at the bubbles popping out of the mouth of a plastic whale, signalling the end of the session. But in Saussan’s Kalamna classes, my son would toddle up to collect a sticker reading “Well done!” in Arabic, while I revelled in a deep sense of achievement: We had found our tribe.

My husband and I have never really resolved our dialect standoff. Regardless, our son’s linguistic development has exceeded our expectations. My son can now express himself adequately in both English and Arabic. Even though he is much more confident in English, he seems just as happy to learn Arabic, and I am content to encourage him at his own pace.

To my great surprise, he can even discern the formal Arabic words my husband sneaks in when I’m not watching. Jubna, my son responds, giggling, when I ask him what he wants in his sandwich, knowing full well that I taught him to say the Egyptian gibna for cheese. In a way, it’s a reassuring sign that he may soon be ready to learn the more formal written language.

Straddling cultures is inevitable for my son, but he seems to have taken on the role of interpreter with his trademark enthusiasm: One day I overheard him using the Egyptian word kanaba to his Anglophone paternal grandfather, who was failing to respond to my son’s commands over where granddad should sit for their game. From the kitchen next door, I heard him suddenly shout out in exasperation: “The sofa, Granddad!”

My resolve is still strong but I can see that my little boy’s is too, and that he does enjoy communicating in this special code we share. I am still committed to encouraging him to speak Arabic, but I’ve come to realize that it’s more critical for him to be proud of the person he is. I hope that he never feels out of place, even if at times he might sound it, that doors may open to him whichever way he turns, and that he remains as joyously open to the possibilities of language and learning as he is now. Because understanding another language is about much more than an extension of verbal communication; it is an entry point into a culture and its mindset that can help us better relate to others and to ourselves.

These days, which mother tongue he uses is dictated by his whim. But now all I insist on is that my boy and I continue to talk and read and sing.