Why You May Feel Like Having Different Personalities Based on the Language You Speak
I speak two languages fluently, Italian and English. I experience the self in two different ways when I speak Italian and when I speak English. It’s as if there was a change in personality happening within the same individual based on the language I speak. That’s a worth-exploring feeling, I noticed.
After some reflection, I came to the following hypothesis: words have meanings. The meaning of the words in your native language is heavier on you because of the emotional attachment you have to those words. You learned every word during the first few years of your life, in specific circumstances, environmental influences, and contexts. You hold emotional baggage associated with specific words and concepts that may be considered taboo in your environment. You internalized vocabulary from your parents and interpreted it based on the perceived emotions you noticed.
The meaning of words in your second/third language is acquired when you are more mature, for most people during school years and intensified (or lost) during teenage years. Especially if you study a language from your home country (not immersed in the culture), words feel light and literal. There are no emotional attachments or childhood memories embedded in the words. So, if you master that language fluently, your personality and behaviors will be more lighthearted and emotion-free than your native tongue.
Consequently, if you acquire great proficiency in a second language by the time you pass your teenage years, this can be a great tool to understand yourself better, integrate your shadow, and explore conversations and thoughts with less perceived psychological “weight”.
What the current research says
Cultural-frame switching is the process of switching to a different personal value system in response to a change in cultural cues. That’s what pivotal research in the field by Benet et. al (2002) posits with strong evidence. According to Benet et. al, such an effect is especially visible in individuals who live in the Country where their second language is spoken natively (e.g., a Chinese person living in the USA). These people are highly culturally aware (whether consciously or subconsciously) and seem to change their behaviors and personality based on the cultural context around them. Such cultural awareness leads to subtle and significant shifts in personality traits (the Big Five framework) in bilingual people.
An additional proven effect impacting your behavior based on the language you speak is the cultural accommodation hypothesis. According to Harzing and Maznevski (2010), questionnaire respondents who are fluent in multiple languages adjust their responses based on the language the questionnaire is in. Influential factors for such behavior include the cultural schema (context) they have soaked in based on their experiences in the languages they speak.
The current research evidence, as a consequence, does not prove the validity of my experience fully: the language you speak does impact your personality if you have high cultural awareness, but words do not seem to have stronger emotional meaning in your native language than they do in your second/third language. There has been no study—based on my research—that has directly looked into such a hypothesis. Some factors in favor of the hypothesis I noticed in my experience include:
Psychological research has well-established that your childhood and early years experiences do impact your current and future self — especially if you haven’t integrated your shadow or made sense of your past through writing/therapy. Just listen to some episodes of the I Will Teach You to Be Rich podcast to get a real-life sense of how the vocabulary we use around money and finances impacts our everyday experience of them.
If early-childhood experiences do influence your psyche and sense of self, why couldn’t it be the same with words? Words are part of your childhood developmental process, and it makes sense to consider them correlated with your early-life experiences and emotional baggage. The vocabulary you use regarding finances, or marriage, is especially influenced by the vocabulary you got used to hearing from your caregivers and surrounding environment. This article on linguistics by professor Deborah Tannen (1995) proposes a very close account of the “emotional” weight of words rooted in childhood and how linguistics plays a role in your daily interactions.
On the other hand, hypothesizing that words have different emotional weights depending on the language you speak may have the fallacy of comparing two objects that differ too much from each other: your native language and a second language. There may be too much proficiency discrepancy between the two, which would discriminate the results of studying this hypothesis.
What’s your experience? Do you “change personality” depending on the language you speak? Do you feel like words have differing emotional “weights” based on the language you speak? The study of linguistics suggests that the words you use (in your native language) are indeed rooted in the cultural schema and childhood experiences you were exposed to in your early years. The rest seems to be up for debate.
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Benet, Veronica & Leu, Janxin & Lee, Fiona & Morris, Michael. (2002). Negotiating BiculturalismCultural Frame Switching in Biculturals with Oppositional Versus Compatible Cultural Identities. Journal of Cross-cultural Psychology - J CROSS-CULT PSYCHOL. 33. 492-516. 10.1177/0022022102033005005.
The Interaction Between Language and Culture: A Test of the Cultural Accommodation Hypothesis in Seven Countries. (2022). Language And Intercultural Communication. Retrieved from https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14708470208668081
