The Balkanish Way — and why your origin is your edge

We were sitting in a café — my boyfriend and I, the way we do best — when the couple at the next table started speaking English. Irish, clearly. We joined in naturally, the way you do when you’ve lived between languages long enough that switching feels like changing shoes.

And then she looked at me and said: “Are you from Croatia?”

I blinked. “How did you know?”

“The way you say your L’s. It’s very Croatian.”

I laughed out loud. Born and raised in Germany. Schooled in German, dreaming sometimes in German, working every day in English for over a decade — and it’s still there. The L. The Balkan, quietly present even when I’m not thinking about it.

I’ve been thinking about that moment ever since.

Because I grew up with two worlds running in parallel. My parents came from Croatia — both of them, proper Gastarbeiter generation, building a life in a small German town while making sure we never forgot where we came from. Croatian school. Croatian at home. German everywhere else. I was never fully one thing or the other. I was both, always.

And now I write in English. I build my content in English, I talk to AI in English, I think about my business in English — mostly. But underneath all of that, I think in something in between. A kind of language I’ve started calling, half-jokingly, Balkanish. It’s not a real word. I know. But it’s a very real thing.

It’s the moment I catch myself explaining a strategy and saying ajmo under my breath before we dive in — let’s go, no overthinking, we move. It’s the way I approach content planning with the same mentality my mama used to approach a Sunday lunch: nothing goes to waste, everything has a purpose, and you feed everyone before you close the kitchen.

It’s the fact that for me, every conversation about AI and business still starts with kava. Coffee. Not a dashboard. Not a funnel. A warm cup, a real question, and a little bit of time to actually think.

I’ve been leaning into this more lately — the Balkanish-ness of how I work. Because I noticed something: when I let it in, the content gets better. Not more polished. Better. More honest. More me.

AI doesn’t erase your accent. If you use it with intention, it amplifies it. The Croatian L is still there. The ajmo energy is still there. The Sunday lunch logic is still there. Whatever makes you you — that doesn’t disappear when you open a chatbot. It shows up in every prompt you write, every angle you choose, every word you keep and every one you delete.

So wherever you come from — whether your identity shows up in a specific humor, a philosophy you inherited from your grandmother, a way of seeing problems that nobody else in your field shares — that’s not a liability in the age of AI. That’s your edge.

Ajmo. ☕

Anita 🇭🇷

BabicADesigns

P.S. Where does your “accent” show up in your content? I’d genuinely love to know.

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