Feel more fun in French?

Your personality can change depending on the language you

speak March 08, 2017 Nicola Prentis

In the book Me Talk Pretty One Day, humorist David Sedaris recounts learning to speak
French as an adult under a vicious instructor. Fumbling in his attempts to master the new
tongue, he feels powerless and vulnerablealmost like a different person entirely.
Anyone whos taken on the challenge of learning a new language can probably relate. But
its more than just a feeling: Research suggests our personalities really can shift depending
on the language we speak.
Margarita, a Russian-American immigrant, came to the US at age 19 to escape anti-
Semitism in the former Soviet Union. Today, her experiences with both cultures seem to
have colored the way she feels when she speaks each language.
When she speaks Russian, she says, she feels guarded, reserved, uncomfortable. But
when she speaks English, she describes herself as curious, outgoing, and free.
Similarly, Tony, who grew up speaking English and Spanish and went on to learn French,
says that when he speaks French he feels sophisticated, elegant, suave. His opinion of
French people and culture? Smart, elegant, admirable.
Indeed, research suggests that our perceptions of the culture associated with a given
language can impact our behavior. A 2006 study (pdf) lead by Nairan Ramrez-Esparza, an
assistant professor of social psychology at the University of Connecticut, and her
colleagues, asked bilingual Mexican Americans to take a personality test in both English
and Spanish. The test measures the Big Five personality traits: extraversion,
agreeableness, openness, conscientiousness, and neuroticism.
The study found that subjects scored higher in extraversion, agreeableness, and
conscientiousness when they took the English version of the test. The authors speculate that
this may reflect the fact that individualistic cultures (like that of the US) place a high
premium on assertiveness, achievement and superficial friendliness, whereas its less
important to sing ones own praises in collectivistic cultures (like that of Mexico).
As a follow-up, in a not yet published paper, Ramrez-Esparza and colleagues asked
subjects to write a 15-minute description of their personalities. They found that, while
writing in Spanish, the Mexican-American subjects talked about themselves in relation to
their families, relationships and hobbies. In English, they spoke of their achievements,
college, and daily activities. Ramrez-Esparza ascribes the changes in personality and the
differing focus on values to the way that language primes behavior.
The language cannot be separated from the cultural values of that language, she says.
You see yourself through the cultural values of the language you are speaking. It makes
sense that this effect is felt particularly strongly by people who are bicultural, as well as
bilingual, because they have a strong grounding in multiple cultures.
Its also possible that our perceptions of our own personalities change because we notice
how people react to us when we speak different languages. After all, identity is your sense
of self, but also how you feel others are perceiving you and how that impacts on how you
can project who you are, says Carolyn McKinney, a professor of language and literacy
studies at the University of Cape Town. And so you might see yourself as a confident,
poised professional when speaking your native English in front of a crowd and watching
the audience hang on your every wordand then feel like a blundering goofball when
conducting a meeting in beginner German.
The minute you speak to someone youre engaging in an identity negotiation, says Bonny
Norton, a professor of language and literacy education at British Columbia University.
Who are you? Where are you? How do I relate to you? How do you see me? So when
someone says their personality changes, what theyre saying is: When I talk to other
people my personality changes.'
It may also be that the context in which you learn a second language is essential to your
sense of self in that tongue. In other words, if youre learning to speak Mandarin while
living in China, the firsthand observations you make about the people and culture during
that period will be built into your sense of identity as a Mandarin speaker. If youre learning
Mandarin in a classroom in the US, youll likely incorporate your instructors beliefs and
associations with Chinese culture along with your owneven if those beliefs are based on
stereotypes.
And if you learn a language without any kind of context, it may not impact your personality
much at all. It is arguable, Jill Hadfield, a professor of language studies at Unitec Institute
of Technology in New Zealand, writes in an email, that if all you use a language for is to
translate or fill blanks in decontextualized sentences such as The pen of my aunt is on the
table, you will not develop a [second-language] identity.
For people learning a language associated with a culture they admire, thats all the more
reason to immerse yourself in itwhether that means taking a trip abroad, watching movies
in your chosen tongue, finding a native speaker who can help you learn about their
countrys traditions, or all of the above. When you learn a new language, youre not just
memorizing vocabulary and grammar rulesyou also have a chance to tap into new parts
of your identity.