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Ophélie Paquet

Are you a different person when you speak another language?

Updated: May 29, 2023


woman using sign language

You may have noticed that you, or people you know, speak and act differently when you speak a different language. For example, you may be loud and fun while speaking French and more reserved and quiet when speaking English or vice versa. There are reasons for that!

You may feel more comfortable in one language over another

Typically, you will feel more comfortable speaking your mother tongue as it is the language you grew up speaking. You have a larger vocabulary, you don’t have an accent, and you rarely make mistakes when you speak your mother tongue. Whether you are just learning a second language or have spoken it for years, speaking it will always be different from your mother tongue. Therefore, you may behave differently when you speak your second language. You might be shyer because you’re afraid of embarrassing yourself by saying something wrong. Or you might not participate in conversations as much as it takes you a bit longer to understand what is being said.

You may speak different languages in different contexts

Typically, you speak your mother tongue at home, with your family, and with your friends. If you speak a second language, you probably learned it at school or university, and you tend to speak it at work, maybe with your neighbours and local acquaintances, and with some friends. You are a different person when you are with your family, your friends, your acquaintances, and your work colleagues, so you might act differently while speaking different languages. The language you speak influences the way you think!

Even if you feel as comfortable speaking your mother tongue as any other language,you might still act differently because the language you speak influences the way you think.

Indeed, language is steeped in cultural and social influences and reflects and influences the way different groups think. For example, Japanese and many other South-East Asian languages are “pronoun-drop languages”, which means that you can drop the pronoun from a sentence (you can say “Went to the movies” instead of “I went to the movies”). The countries that have pronoun-drop languages have been shown to have more collectivist values compared to countries that speak languages like English which have more individualist values.

This not only happens on a societal level but also an individual level. Languages tend to think of numbers and time in different ways, which influences on how you perceive these concepts. For example, in English, 92 is “ninety-two” whereas in French it is “quatre vingt douze” or “four twenty twelve.”

The way you act when speaking different languages reflects not only your level of comfort with the language you’re currently speaking and the context you are speaking it in, but it is also due to the way language influences thoughts.

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