Learning a new language causes one to take on a new personality
Summary
- The words we speak affect our identity
Details
- Multilingual people sometimes have different behaviours according to the language they are speaking
- When we speak a different language we have different behaviours, but also different memories
- learning a new language requires that we feel free to change our personality or opinions
References
Quotes
Psychologists have long known that the words we speak are entwined with our identity. It’s a cliche that French makes you more romantic, or Italian makes you more passionate, but each language becomes associated with cultural norms that can affect how you behave – it could be as simple as whether you value outspoken confidence or quiet reflection, for instance. Importantly, various studies have found that multilingual people often adopt different behaviours according to the language they are speaking.
Different languages can also evoke different memories of your life – as the writer Vladimir Nabokov discovered when working on his autobiography. The native Russian speaker wrote it first in his second language, English, with agonising difficulty, finding that “my memory was attuned to one key – the musically reticent Russian, but it was forced into another key, English”. Once it was finally published, he decided to translate the memoirs back into the language of his childhood, but as the Russian words flowed, he found his memories started to unfurl with new details and perspectives. “His Russian version differed so much he felt the need to retranslate to English,” says Aneta Pavlenko at Temple University in Philadelphia, whose book, The Bilingual Mind, explores many of these effects. It was almost as if his English and Russian selves had subtly different pasts.
Resisting the process of reinvention may prevent you from learning another language so well, says Keeley, who is a professor of cross-cultural management at Kyushu Sangyo University in Japan. He recently ran a survey of Chinese speakers learning Japanese to examine their “ego permeability” – with questions such as “I find it easy to put myself in other’s shoes and imagine how they feel” or “I can do impressions of other people”, and whether you can change your opinions to suit the people you are near. As he suspected, the people who score highly on these traits had much greater fluency in their new language.