Do you speak another language? Do you have an alternate personality?
These two questions at first glance may not appear to be interrelated, but research has shown that those who have acquired skills in a second language often feel they have acquired a second personality along with it!
Perhaps you’ve already noticed this personality switch in yourself or in others. Personally, I can recall observing this phenomenon during a year abroad in East Asia. As newbies to the language that is often cited as the most impenetrable for native-English speakers to learn, most of my classmates and I spoke a brand of Mandarin that was as robotic as it was grammatically inaccurate. It was unnatural for us, with the exception of one classmate. She was a bit older than us and had experience with Chinese, having taken a few years of it in high school. When I met her for the first time, I remember being a little taken aback by her confidence and laid-back demeanor. About to embark on a yearlong home-stay in a foreign country without a single familiar face, she was without a trace of anxiety. For such a young person to have that air of assurance was both refreshing and inspiring.
By the time we began our intensive language classes, my fellow American classmates and I had grown familiar with each other – which may explain why it was so surprising to hear my normally calm, cool, self-assured friend speak in a voice that reminded me of Karen Walker’s (Megan Mullally’s) from Will & Grace. Her tone changed. Her inflection changed. The pitch of her voice was considerably higher. Her facial expressions softened. She smiled sweetly and giggled her way through sentences. Who was this person and where did my cool new friend go?
After years of pondering this question alone, I decided to ask thousands of former exchange students whether or not they have had similar experiences. Sharing this article, I was immediately bombarded by a deluge of responses from foreign language speakers from around the world.
Totally! My native language is Spanish, and when I speak English I don’t change that much. But when I switch to Japanese, even my body language is different, it’s like I’m someone else!
I totally do that. In English I’m mostly in control, but sometimes anxious. In Spanish I’m light-hearted and joking, and in German I’m either stony or silly. I think German has more to do with ability than anything else though.
I’m an English-native speaker and know Italian and Spanish…. I don’t notice much change when I speak Spanish, but I definitely have different inflection and even slightly different humor when I’m speaking Italian…. and while I rarely use my hands when speaking English, there’s no way to speak Italian without the gestures…
I speak Faroese, Danish, Norwegian, English and Spanish, and when I’m speaking Spanish, I’m a lot different than in any other language. I think it’s because Spanish-talking people don’t have the same humor as in North Europe.
Clearly, the sentiment was all-too-common among this crowd. With the exception of one quadrilingual individual who maintained that his personality did not change (to which others responded calling him a cyborg – hey, that’s not nice!), everyone agreed that switching personas along with languages was a regular occurrence. For some, learning a new language allowed them to “discover their true selves”, which brings the Czech proverb, “Learn a new language and get a new soul” to mind. For others, the phenomenon could be broken down and attributed to the different languages’ unique structural requirements. As one commenter put it:
Latin-derived languages (Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, etc) are EXTREMELY verb-oriented, the verb is crucial in the sentence so most of the ideas, hence the “feeling of the language” is toward doing something, will do something or done something… In English the noun is ‘more powerful’ and that certainly makes it different to me to even think in English.”
Body movements, hand gestures, facial expressions – even your sense of humor can change with the switch of a language. Through very limited and informal research, I have found evidence to support my theory that people are constantly in the process of changing and evolving. No matter how static one may seem, dynamism is truly at the core of every human being.
Jenna Brydges authored this blog and is a volunteer at Tech Valley Connect while attending the NYS University at Albany majoring in International Studies. Jenna has lived in China and speaks fluent Mandarin. To learn more unique ways to address cultural differences and employee retention click on…Tech Valley Connect or contact [email protected] . Tech Valley Connect is an organization assisting newly relocating professionals and their families to assimilate into the Capital Region.