Andre Milosavljević was born in Kitchener, Ontario — but his upbringing was Serbian from the start. Both his parents had emigrated from Serbia, and they raised their family the way the Serbian diaspora in Canada typically does: with the language, the faith, the food, and the community kept deliberately alive.
Serbian was spoken at home — not as an occasional practice but as the primary language of family life. The Serbian Orthodox church was a fixture of the week. Weekend Serbian school meant learning to read and write in Cyrillic — a detail most Canadian kids his age couldn't imagine, and one that would matter years later when he arrived in Serbia to find that every official document, every street sign, and every government form used an alphabet his classmates had never seen.
Language at home
Serbian spoken fluently from birth — not a second language, but the first language of family life in Kitchener. English was the language of school and the outside world; Serbian was the language of home.
Serbian school & Cyrillic
Enrolled in Serbian school to learn the Cyrillic alphabet — the same schooling Serbian diaspora communities across Canada and the US have maintained for generations to preserve the written language.
Serbia was never an abstraction to Andre. He first visited at 13 — not as a tourist, but as someone going back to where his family was from. The visits continued throughout his teens and into adulthood. He knew the country the way children of emigrants know their parents' homeland: personally, not academically. The culture, the pace of life, the way people relate to each other — none of it required explanation. It was already part of who he was.
- Born
- Kitchener, Ontario, Canada
- Home language
- Serbian — spoken fluently from birth
- Community
- Serbian Orthodox church, diaspora events
- Serbian school
- Attended to learn the Cyrillic alphabet