Someone’s mother tongue focuses on the process of learning a new foreign language and how this affects one’s mother tongue, identity and sense of belonging. Westerveld collaborated with language school SIPI - Stichting Interculturele Participatie en Integratie- and the participation centre eVa en adaM in Amsterdam North where people come to take Dutch language and conversation classes. Talking with teachers and students and observing the classes, Westerveld aimed to record the hopeful crisis that learning a new language brings about. Of her notes and drawings, made during the research, she made metal and wooden letterpress arrangements and stencils from light sensitive toyobo plates. These various compositions were then printed as blind embossment and with ink, before being refined by hand. The prints alternate between the legibility of words and sentences, the visibility of human figures and the disintegration of meaning and distinct form. The images are echoes of the learning process, its frustration and hope, and the way the old and the new begin to intertwine.