Do You Become a Different Person When You Speak Another Language?

First, what would “becoming a different person” actually mean?

Personality is not the same thing as behavior in one conversation.

You probably speak differently to a close friend, a professor, a child, and a stranger even if every conversation happens in the same language. You may be loud at dinner and quiet in a meeting without acquiring a new personality between rooms.

So there are at least three different claims hidden inside the question:

• Feeling different: you subjectively feel more serious, emotional, funny, fake, confident, or reserved in one language.
• Behaving differently: other people can observe changes in how you talk or act.
• Having a different personality: your underlying personality traits themselves have changed.

Research provides evidence for the first two. The third is much harder to establish.

That distinction prevents a fascinating bilingual phenomenon from turning into a misleading slogan.

It is not only questionnaires

A reasonable objection is that people might merely answer translated personality tests differently.

Later work tried to move beyond that problem.

Sylvia Chen and Michael Bond studied Hong Kong Chinese–English bilinguals using self-reports as well as actual conversations. Their repeated-measures research found effects associated with perceived cultural norms, the language being used, and the ethnicity of the person participants were talking to.

That last variable matters.

If personality expression were caused by language alone, the interlocutor should be irrelevant.

But real conversation is social. We adapt to who is in front of us.

The authors interpreted their results through cultural accommodation: using a language can make norms associated with its cultural group more accessible, and speakers may express themselves in ways that fit that linguistic-social context.

Chen & Bond (2010) therefore gives us a more realistic picture than “press English, activate English personality.”

Language, culture, and conversation partner can work together.

Many multilinguals really do report feeling different

The subjective experience should not be dismissed just because “two personalities” is too strong.

Dewaele and Nakano studied 106 adult multilinguals representing 31 first languages. Participants reported systematic differences in feelings such as being logical, serious, emotional, fake, or simply different across their languages.

A later study by Dewaele used qualitative and quantitative data from 1,005 bi- and multilinguals to investigate why this feeling occurs.

One tempting explanation is straightforward:

You feel different in a later language because you learned it later and cannot express yourself as well.

But the data did not support that as a general explanation. In that study, age of acquisition was not related to the degree of feeling different, and neither self-reported speaking proficiency nor frequency of use showed the expected significant relationship. Age, education, and certain forms of foreign-language anxiety were among the variables that did relate to the feeling.

Participants also described changes in behavior and the distinctive contexts in which their languages were used. Some said the feeling itself changed over time.

That makes the phenomenon more interesting, not less.

Feeling different cannot be reduced to:

“My English is worse, so I cannot be myself.”

Dewaele & Nakano (2013) · Dewaele (2016)

Different languages often belong to different lives

François Grosjean has long emphasized a basic fact about bilingual life: languages are often acquired and used for different purposes, in different domains, with different people.

This is easy to overlook in experiments because we talk about “Turkish” and “English” as if they were two buttons inside the brain.

In daily life, switching language may simultaneously mean switching:

• person;
• place;
• topic;
• social status;
• cultural expectations;
• degree of formality;
• memories;
• community;
• conversational style.

Suppose you speak your first language mostly with parents and your second language mostly with friends your own age.

If you feel more independent in your second language, what caused it?

The grammar?

The cultural frame?

The age and relationship of your conversation partners?

The fact that your second-language life developed later, when you were already an adult?

Probably no single variable deserves all the credit.

This is why Grosjean warns against treating a bilingual as two monolinguals living inside one person. Bilingual experience forms its own system, with languages activated differently depending on the situation.

Grosjean (1997)

A second language can also change what you are able to express

There is another layer that does not require cultural priming at all.

Your personality can only be expressed through the language resources available to you.

Imagine that you are quick, sarcastic, and playful in your first language but have intermediate English.

You may know exactly what kind of joke you want to make and still lack:

• the timing;
• the idiom;
• the double meaning;
• the pragmatic softener;
• the confidence to interrupt;
• the speed to respond before the moment passes.

To another person, you may therefore appear quieter or more serious.

That does not prove your personality changed.

The bandwidth for expressing it changed.

This is one reason speaking proficiency matters in everyday experience even when proficiency alone cannot explain the research on feeling different.

As your language becomes more automatic, more of your normal conversational repertoire can become available: teasing, hedging, storytelling, disagreement, affection, irony, repair, and spontaneity.

But sometimes the new constraints are liberating

Limited history in a language can work in the opposite direction too.

A learner may feel unusually bold in English.

Why?

Perhaps English is associated with people who have never known the shy version of them.

Perhaps mistakes feel less personally revealing.

Perhaps the language was learned in environments where speaking up was rewarded.

Perhaps certain social conventions make directness feel more acceptable.

Or perhaps a new language gives enough psychological distance to try behaviors that already existed as possibilities.

None of these explanations requires a hidden English personality waiting to escape.

They describe how a new social-linguistic environment can expand the range of behavior a person practices.

Over years, that practice may even feed back into the rest of life.

So can learning a language change you?

In the broad sense, of course.

Learning another language can give you relationships, media, communities, education, work, travel, and experiences you would not otherwise have had.

Those experiences can change a person.

But that is a much larger claim than saying that switching vocabulary for thirty seconds instantly rewrites personality.

The research supports something subtler and more useful:

language can be a cue for different learned ways of being.

For bicultural speakers, a language may activate cultural frames. For any bilingual, it can also change the people, memories, roles, norms, and expressive resources present in a conversation.

That combination can be strong enough to feel like becoming someone else.