For me, it's chuchichäschtli. (I've had to look up the spelling because I've never seen it written down!) The word in itself, Swiss-German for 'kitchen cupboard', doesn't have a very special meaning. But there's a reason why I remember it almost 20 years after hearing it. Here's the story:

When I was 16, I did an exchange year abroad in New Zealand. Throughout the year, the exchange program organised trips so that we could see more of the country and culture. It also gave a group of teenagers from all over the world a chance to meet and share their experiences. One night, on one of these trips, a bunch of us were hanging out after a long day of travel. I don’t remember how it started, but we ended up pointing at objects around us, asking “What’s that called in your language?”. We’d hear the word said in Spanish, Finnish, Japanese, Swiss-German, French and Dutch, and we tried to reproduce the foreign sounds to the best of our ability. Perhaps that was where my later interest in linguistics started!

My native language is a large part of the feeling I call ‘home’. It’s a comforting thought that wherever I travel, I always get to take that part of home with me. And if I’m lucky, I might be able to share some of it when someone I meet points at an object and asks me: “What do you call that in your language?”.