HOMELAND
“Homeland / Native Country is the past, my roots and my mother.”
“Homeland / Native Country is a place where I have rights.”
“Homeland / Native Country is a new word, it is the place where I live, drink and eat, and it can be changed with time.”
“Old Homeland is memories, stories and feelings.
New Homeland is the place where I find my dignity. It's not always the country you were born in, if this doesn’t give you dignity, freedom of speech and expression.”
“Homeland is the smell of Jasmine, coffee and the sea.”
Theoretical Background
In the Cambridge Dictionary, “home” is defined as someone’s or something’s place of origin, or the place where a person feels they belong. While that place would be the same for some people, the place of origin and the place where they belong could be completely opposite for others.
In the Collins Dictionary, the concept of origin is emphasised, while belonging is just a factor to this sense of belonging: You can use home to refer in a general way to the house, town, or country where someone lives now or where they were born, often to emphasize that they feel they belong in that place.
In other dictionaries, the term is often associated with family and residence. And then again the places where someone’s family is and where they reside could be completely apart. Oxford Languages highlights time in its definition of home: the place where one lives permanently, especially as a member of a family or household.
In the definition of the term “Heimat”, a German word translating to “home” or “homeland” and that has connotations specific to German culture and society so that it has no exact English equivalent, home functions as the close environment that is understandable and transparent, as a frame, in which behavioural expectations are met, in which reasonable, expectable actions are possible – in contrast to foreignness and alienation, as a sector of appropriation, of active saturation, of reliability. (Heimat in Wikipedia)
