If I'm a Different Person with Each Language I Speak, Who am I?

Exploring personality in light of language—or is it vice-versa?

Written by Julia Gralki, Typography by Urja Dwivedi

Can you do an American accent?” someone asked me. It was a hot summer day in North Carolina and my cross-country team was seeking shelter under the trees. We were getting ready for another meet.

“You mean an American accent in German?” I asked, looking around me to see if anyone was listening in on our conversation.

“No,” they said, “in English.”

My following attempt at an American accent must have seemed a little helpless. I was confused. I had been trying so hard to get rid of my German accent already that I hadn’t expected a question like this to come up.

I had only recently moved to the United States and my speaking contained a lot of stumbling over words, mispronouncing them, and putting them in the wrong places. But it was this moment that pushed me to perfect my pseudo-American accent even further, just to see if it was possible. I was fascinated by the idea of blending in seamlessly, of hiding my accent so perfectly that people wouldn’t be able to tell where I’m from when they heard me speak.

One and a half years later came the day a professor told me that I speak with “no trace of a German accent” and I barely hid my smile. I had finally managed to mask that part of who I am. I had finally left behind the German part of me, the part I no longer wanted to be.

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

—Charlemagne, 9th Century Emperor of the Romans

“Your voice is different when you speak English,” a friend said as we switched back to speaking in German from English. We were walking in snow-covered woods during the never-ending coronavirus lockdown in Germany.

She was right. My voice did sound different in English. The moment I flip the switch from German to English, not only does my voice have a different ring to it, but also my personality. It’s like there are two separate rooms in my head—one labeled English, the other German.

“I miss speaking English,” I told my friend that day. We had been speaking in English for nearly our entire walk.

“Why?” she asked.

“It’s like I’m missing a part of myself,” I said.

Perhaps Charlemagne had it right? Maybe there are two separate personalities inside me? I talk the most in English—I’m more expressive, more confident. Even the sound of my laugh is different. I’m still shy regardless of which language I’m using, but when I speak German I feel more rigid, more conservative, and less talkative.

Research shows that I’m not the only one who feels like a different person depending on the language I speak in. A University of Wisconsin- Milwaukee study, published in 2008, shows that most Hispanic bilinguals shift personalities along with language. The participants said they felt more assertive when speaking Spanish compared to English. They were also perceived as more extroverted by those around them.

Lina Vasquez, a YouTuber and professional language coach who speaks eight languages, has made similar experiences although she disagrees with this conception of personality. In conversation with Vasquez, I learned that she is not just a polyglot, but that she also grew up in multiple cultures and countries. She was born in Latvia, raised mostly in Australia, and heavily influenced by her stepfather’s Peruvian heritage.

When she started learning Brazilian Portuguese, she noticed that she felt more alive in that language, as it ignited a flame inside her that other languages hadn’t. “A language always comes from the culture,” Vasquez said. “And a culture always transports emotion and feeling.”

A language is an exact reflection of the character and growth of its speakers.

—Cesar Chavez, Civil Rights Activist

The day I boarded a plane to the United States, I changed my phone’s language to English. Almost simultaneously, I switched my brain’s language to English too. I started thinking in that language and I haven’t stopped since. My thoughts flow with more ease and, quite literally, I feel more myself in a language other than my mother tongue.

“We all go through that lifelong questioning of who am I,” Vasquez said. Even as a child, she found herself in between two cultures, not knowing where she truly belonged. “I was never really Australian,” she said. “But then I was never really Latvian as well.”

For Vasquez, the answer to the question “who am I?” has been shaped and expanded by her multi-cultural upbringing. “I wouldn’t be the same person if I hadn’t grown up with all these languages,” she said. “The exposure I had to different cultures influenced my open-mindedness into knowing that the world was bigger than just me and my language. That’s also where my sense of curiosity was definitely fed.”

The eight languages Vasquez speaks are Spanish, English, Portuguese, German, Latvian, French, and Russian. She uses some of these languages in her job as a language coach. She also journals and listens to music in different languages (even in ones she doesn’t speak or understand) and has several languages for meditation and prayer. Vasquez uses meditation not only to practice languages but also as a means of self-development.

“Spending time with yourself inevitably allows you to get to know yourself better and be able to step away from those intrusive thoughts that create fear and anxiety,” Vasquez wrote once in a newsletter to subscribers of her language blog and learning platform.

When she speaks English with me, the words flow with ease and calmness—mixed with a pinch of an Australian-Latvian accent. “I would say both in English and Latvian I feel like myself, probably because I’ve spoken those languages for the longest time,” Vasquez told me. “But what does it even mean to be myself?”

Identity is always changing. Cesar Chavez said that language is a mirror to the character and growth of its speakers. In what I glean from this, language is a reflection of our personality and personality is a reflection of our language. It moves both ways.

To learn a language is to have one more window from which to look at the world.

—Chinese Proverb

Language is also a reflection of our views of the world. While we use language to express our opinions, it also determines how we can express them.

“In Brazilian Portuguese,” Vasquez said, “you have so many different words for somebody who’s your friend, a lover, or someone that you love. So, naturally, there’s more tools to construct oneself in that way.”

The diversity and specificity of words show what values a culture is centered around. In this way, language creates a window through which we look at the world.

Elias Capello, a professor of anthropology at SCAD, agrees that language and our perception of the world are intertwined. “In Russian, ‘blue’ has many different categories,” he said. “There’s a different category for light blue, and there’s a different category for regular blue or royal blue. Whereas in the United States, typically in American English, we just have one category of blue. Later on, people learn the difference between light blue and dark blue.”

Brain scans have shown that people who speak a language that differentiates between categories of blue perceive the color with greater sensitivity. This is not only proof that language shapes our perception of the world, but also that language influences our biological setup.

But how much power does language actually have?

Language shapes the way we think, and determines what we can think about.

—Benjamin Lee Whorf, Linguist

Benjamin Lee Whorf was an American linguist who studied the relationship between language and our thinking. Our experience of the world is mediated through culture and language. When a culture names an object, it makes the object culturally significant. Like “blue,” some words are named more thoroughly than others. Therefore, the worlds of different cultures are distinct worlds—not just the same world seen through another set of words.

Language has the power to shape the way we think and what we think about. “Based on the language that I speak, different things come to my mind,” Capello said. “For example, if ‘bridge’ is masculine in your main language, you’ll think of bridges as masculine. Whereas if ‘bridge’ is feminine, you’ll see bridges as beautiful and less industrial.”

The fact that language influences our perception of the world also challenges the concept of truth and reality. “Saying what is truth, or what is better than another can only be relative,” Capello said, “because our perception differs based on the language that we engage with.”

Perhaps language not only shapes the way we see the world, but also the way we think about ourselves. For example, the image I hold of myself in English is more outgoing, more talkative, more creative. My sense of humor is drier in German. I even find myself thinking about political and environmental issues differently in German—all because the linguistic resources my brain has been given are different.

The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.

—Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosopher

When Ludwig Wittgenstein spoke this, he meant that the human existence is beyond our understanding and can’t be put into words. But there is always more than one interpretation.

Language limits us in how we think and express ourselves. Yet, at the same time, we get the chance to expand and overstep this limit with each language we learn. It opens the door for a new way of seeing and understanding the world around us.

Switching to a different language is like changing from jazz music to classical music. “You’re going to be dancing in a different way to jazz than if you play classical music. You’re going to move and dance in a different way,” Vasquez said. “I think the different languages I speak allow me to share more of myself, just in a different way.”

“You kind of take on the things from the people around you, from the cultures that you have experienced and lived in, to almost create a new world and a new understanding,” she said.

Capello has similar experiences. When he visits his parents in Louisiana, the contrast between the French Creole he uses at home and the academic English he uses when teaching becomes especially apparent. “I’ll code-switch and talk to my parents in a way that’s almost as if I don’t have my Ph.D.,” Capello said. When he is with his parents, his language is more focused on family values. However, while at SCAD, he said he thinks more about social justice and diversity.

“You might make more sarcastic jokes with your friends than you would with your parents,” he said. “And that’s overexaggerated if your parents speak one language, and you speak another with your friends. So there might be a whole subculture of personality that you engage in, like, maybe you’re more sarcastic, maybe you have a more dry humor.”

Professor Capello’s words ring true for me, too. When I speak or write in English, it feels like an upbeat, active music track. I find more ways to express the person I want to be. I am less concerned about the past. It’s almost as if the language propels me forward. Speaking another language gives me more opportunities. It’s like unlocking the next level of a video game—the language is opening itself up to all its people, culture, and community.

So, am I really a different person when I speak another language?

I prefer a layered identity; I am the sum of many parts.

—Stan Grant, Journalist

"When you show up, you want people to perceive you in a certain way,” Capello said. “Because people’s perception of us can shape the identity labels we find.”

When I decided to drop my German accent, it was because I didn’t want the label “German” stuck on me. I wanted to be free in deciding who I share that piece of information with rather than it being revealed by the way I speak.

But speaking without a foreign accent doesn’t make me any less German. It is one thing I will never be able to change about myself. The only thing that changed is the way it’s expressed.

“I think some staples of our personality stay the same,” Capello said. “If you’re an open-minded person, you’re going to be open-minded in every situation. What changes is how that comes across.”

Vasquez agrees. “I wouldn’t say that I’m a different person. I think that as human beings, our brain is naturally trained to stereotype and to put things into boxes,” she said. “So it makes it easy for us to say, ‘I become like this when I speak that language,’ and, ‘I become like that in a different language.’ It’s not like I become someone different. I’m always Lina, but I’m multifaceted.”

Multifaceted—a face made up of many parts. There’s no correct way to show oneself, no singular way to express who we are. Every part of the whole contributes to a completed picture. No one aspect of who I am is more myself than another.

Every part of me is part of the whole.

In what I glean from this, language is a reflection of our personality and personality is a reflection of our language. It moves both ways.