‘I’m stricter in Italian’ – the multiple personas of multilingualism
Many polyglots switch to a different personality when switching languages: they argue more reservedly in Mandarin than in Swiss German, are more emotional in Albanian or prefer to solve problems in English. What is behind this phenomenon?
In the family kitchen, the steam vent is roaring, the children have just come home. “I speak almost exclusively Italian with them,” says author and yoga teacher Elisa Malinverni in the broadest Bernese dialect of Swiss German. Her two children always answer in German. Today, however, the older son interjects: “Mängisch parleni o Italiano!”
There is a colourful back and forth, a switching between Italian and Swiss German in this house. And yet: for Malinverni, each language has its own function. “On the one hand, Italian is for me the language of slogans. There’s this flirt vibe, and I can let my inner Sophia Loren run free. But Italian also has a certain austerity because it’s deeply connected to my mother, a very authoritarian figure in my life.”
What was still frowned upon in her own parental home, switching between Italian and German, the mother of two now consciously uses as a tool in everyday life: “when I have to push my children in the morning, I switch to Swiss German. Then I’m less strict with them than in Italian.”
The ‘emotional resonance’ of languages
“Very many multilingual people perceive a language and personality switch,” says Jean-Marc Dewaele, professor of applied linguistics at Birkbeck University in London.
Originally raised in Belgium, he knows the phenomenon from his own experience: “I read and write poetry almost exclusively in French. In the family we speak a lot of Dutch. But as an academic, I’m British: in my choice of words as well as in my attitude and habitus.”
In numerous studies with a total of 1,500 participants, Dewaele’s thesis was confirmed: 80% of the multilingual people studied said that they behaved differently depending on the language. According to Dewaele, the “emotional resonance” of languages works in the background.
Multilingualism and morality
A well-known thought experiment from moral psychology makes the emotional resonance of languages tangible. Five people are lying tied up on a track. A train is heading towards them without braking. Only you have the possibility to stop the train by pushing a very strong person off a bridge onto the track. “Would you do that? Tu le ferais? Würdest du das tun? Würsch das mache?”
Depending on the language in which the moral dilemma is presented to you, you might come to a different conclusion. This is the result of a study published in 2014 by the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona.
In their mother tongue, 80% of the respondents still decided against pushing the man off the bridge. In English, the second language of the participants, the ratio changed: three times more respondents said they would do it and decided according to the principle of utility, i.e. more utilitarian.
The study leaders concluded that psychological distance and pragmatism are greater in the second language than in the first language. “The participants reacted more emotionally in their first language and more rationally in their second language,” adds Dewaele, who is familiar with the study.
Depending on the context in which one has learned a language, more or less emotion is associated with it, he says: “We learn the mother tongue or first language in a family context, which is very emotional. When we learn a language in a classroom, the linguistic access to the emotional world is often completely missing. With the first language, the emotional resonance is very big, in the second case it is small.”
Using the language switch consciously
Like author and yoga teacher Elisa Malinverni, multilingual people can actively use the switch. For example, it can be helpful to think about financial issues in a more rational second language.
Language switching is also a useful tool in psychotherapy, says Dewaele. “Patients may be able to describe trauma more easily in a more rational second language. At a later stage, these can be expressed in the first language, even if the therapist does not understand the language.”
Language as facets of one’s personality
Languages, with their emotional resonance, can thus resonate with speakers in different ways, like instruments. “I think there is something wonderful about experiencing yourself differently in different languages,” Malinverni sums up. “You have your own language for almost every facet of your own personality.”
Linguist Dewaele adds: what was a second or foreign language can also become a new language of the heart.
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