Two languages, two personalities?
Can you identify the characteristics and personality of the languages you speak? And how does that influence your speech and behavior? Have you ever noticed a change in yourself when you are speaking another language? Do you become more shy, agitated, introverted, or extroverted?
In recent years, researchers in neuroscience and linguistics have tried to determine the link between languages and personality. University laboratories around the world, which study how the human brain processes and perceives language, intensify their studies on the subject each year.
Medieval emperor Charlemagne said “speaking another language is having a second soul”, but the idea that we express different personality traits when we speak another language was generally seen as a myth.
Larry King interview — Venezuelan-born Édgar Ramírez — who stars as Gianni Versace in ‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story’ — discusses a childhood spent all over the world, learning to speak five languages, and the identity he has in each.
Recently, The Economist magazine took a step forward and examined the science behind this idea, analyzing the issue from many intriguing angles. Perhaps the most obvious is that bilingual speakers can have different associations with each language — for example, home and work — and thus associate different types of behavior with each one.
One of the most interesting is how different grammatical structures can allow different behaviors. Greeks are known to continually interrupt conversations. In this case, a linguistic scholar proposed a specific grammatical causality line for this personality: in Greek, the verb comes in the first place already bringing a lot of information, so it is easy to interrupt. Welsh, for example, also has a verb-first as strongly inflected as Greek, but the Welsh are not known as pushy talkers.
Linguists Jean-Marc Dewaele and Aneta Pavlenko interviewed over a thousand bilinguals. One of the questions was to determine whether people feel different when they speak other languages. Almost two-thirds confirmed different personality traits and expressions of alternative emotions, depending on your choice of language.
Understanding the relationship between languages, culture, and personality
Greg Kaplan explains in the following TEDx, that many multilingual are not necessarily multicultural. For example, a business professional may learn another language for work, but, as an adult, he is much more likely to transfer his own culture to the new language or, perhaps, to blend his new language skill into the corporate culture. On the other hand, some people grew up in a truly multicultural environment, where their cultural landmarks tend to change with language changes.
Two languages, two personalities?
In recent years, studies have investigated the link between personality traits (OCEAN Personality Test), Emotional Intelligence (IE), and the notion of ‘feeling different’ when using a foreign language. Statistical analyzes reveal that personality traits such as Extroversion, Kindness, and Openness affected noticeable changes, behavior, or body language when other languages are being used. A similar effect was found for IE factors, such as Emotion, Empathy, Social Consciousness, Perception of Emotion, Emotion Management, and Sociability. These results may explain why some people report changes in personality. It is speculated that the existence of self-reported personality changes could be attributed more to certain personality traits and IE, which allows such subtle changes to be noticed. The results of this study show the complexity of the relationship between language, culture, and emotions, suggesting that both high and low order personality traits should be incorporated into future research on various aspects of bilingualism.
At first, it was concluded that people assume the characteristics of foreigners when they change languages. Personality changes, however, go deeper than the desire to gesture wildly when speaking in Italian, for example. According to the research, the use of different languages alters basic human characteristics. University of Texas researchers made this discovery while studying the personality traits of English and Spanish speakers in the United States and Mexico. They started by establishing the attributes of native speakers, using personality tests of almost 170,000 people. The results showed that Americans speaking the Spanish language are more pleasant and outgoing, like native Mexicans.
With that in mind, the context in which languages are learned calls for alternative emotions and alters our perspective, behavior, and levels of self-perception. Michael J. Koven’s research body reaffirms this, with a group of French and Portuguese bilinguals emphasizing different personality traits and behaviors depending on their choice of language. This suggests that the age at which languages are learned also has an impact, depending on the level of our cognitive development at the time when we become multilingual and fluent in alternative dialects.
On a final note, cultural aspects that are deeply rooted in language can also affect the personalities of bilinguals. Our cultural identity and values have a huge influence on our learning, but those who are bilingual probably traveled and absorbed alternative cultures and lifestyles. This will directly change your view and challenge your existing values, potentially creating an altered attitude, which manifests itself in countless different ways.
SOURCES
www.newscientist.com
www.telegraph.co.uk
www.theeconomist.com
www.ted.com
www.psychologytoday.com
SPECIAL THANKS
A special thanks to my dear student Flavia Cianci for bringing this subject to our class and awakening our research about the areas we really enjoy, Education and Neuroscience.
