Rowan Cheer

Holly Batty

April 20, 2018

The Changes of Personality with Language

Those who speak a single language do not know, nor would they consider how one acts

when speaking to someone in Spanish or German as opposed to English. Those who are bilingual

or trilingual even, speak and behave in a manner far different than how they would in English.

Many of these differences come simply from English being a far removed language from that of

the rest of the world. Another factor is the environment that most of them are raised in. It is often

the case that they grow up under strict parental guidance; With the culture they grew up in will

be a major factor in how they behave while speaking to certain people.

The first of many situations is that of family life, it is that we wake up to. Unconsciously,

those who speak a different language at home do so in a manner very different than that of which

they do with people they do not converse with in that language. The change is subtle enough that

it is uncommon to hear it without knowledge of both the languages and to be a third party

listening in rather than participating within the conversation. In an article written in

Communicaid it outlined some of the benefits of being multilingual “For example, being able to

speak another language is linked to a more flexible brain. This, coupled with cultural influences

amongst languages, may have an impact. For example, some multinguals reported a difference in

speaking style. These differences ranged from the level of perceived rudeness to frequency of

interrupting another speaker”. In a sense the meaning is that you do not just speak a different

language than before, you act in an entirely different way depending on who you are speaking to

and what language is being spoken at the time. One might speak with a casual tone in English,

however they may speak to someone else with more respect in a more formal language such as
German or Spanish. This could very well be due to the circumstances one is raised in that they

learned the language.

In an English speaking home one learns to speak casually by default. They learn this way

as there are two ways of speaking, casual and formal. Casual is what English speakers talk in

when in social situations, such as schools, parties, and at home. Formal is what is spoken in

office buildings or other such professional situations. In a language such as Spanish, for

example, teaching it relies so heavily on the understanding the position of teacher and student.

But on top of being more formal of a language it also causes the speakers to feel, in a sense,

closer to one another. Mich of it requires attention to verb tense. To put it in more

understandable terms “The phonological system of Spanish is significantly different from that of

English, particularly in the aspects of vowel sounds and sentence stress. These differences are

very serious obstacles to Spanish learners being able to acquire a native-English-speaker accent”.

There is very much a large difference between english and spanish in terms of speech patterns

that signify differences in who is being spoken to and how much respect they have for them.

Though some say this change in attitude is due to a mental change in the person entirely, almost

if their personality itself changes.

Ervin, S. (1964). An analysis of the interaction of language, topic, and listener. In John Gumperz

and Dell Hymes (eds.), The Ethnography of Communication, special issue of American

Anthropologist, 66, Part 2, 86-102.

Grosjean, F. Personality, thinking and dreaming, and emotions in bilinguals. Chapter 11 of

Grosjean, F. (2010). Bilingual: Life and Reality. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.

Prigg, Mark. “Being Bilingual Really Can Put You in Two Minds: Researchers Say People Can
Have Different Personalities in Each Language.” Daily Mail Online, Associated Newspapers, 20
Mar. 2015, www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3004943/Being-bilingual-really-two-minds-
Researchers-say-people-different-personalities-language.html.