For many multilinguals, switching between tongues can lead to shifts in personality, revealing the malleability of the self
As I take my seat on the plane to Bologna, the realisation washes over me: I will soon be home. It’s in the quick whisper that I overhear, the joke shared in an accent that I’ve missed, or the laughter of a child in a familiar intonation. These sounds in my native language, Italian, ease me back into an old reality.
I’ve been living in Taiwan for more than a decade. When I first arrived, fresh out of university with a one-way ticket, my plan was to study Chinese for six months and return to Italy. Instead, I stayed, completed my Chinese course, earned a master’s degree, and gradually built a life in Taipei, where I now hold a corporate job.
Every year, though, I return to Italy to visit my family, and with each trip I feel as if I’m leaving behind parts of my trilingual identity that I have no use for during my stay in the Italian countryside. There’s the straightforward and outgoing persona I adopt when speaking English, a second language that has gradually overtaken my thoughts and dreams. And there is my Chinese-language side: corporate, polite and detached.
When I’m in Taiwan, Chinese is the language of work and everyday interactions with acquaintances and strangers. Even after more than a decade of practice, it feels limiting when I try to connect with others on a deeper level. For me, speaking in Chinese feels like being stuck in a less articulate version of myself. I fail to capture nuances that come naturally in Italian or English, and I painfully notice my inability to express the full range of my emotions, opinions and knowledge.
If you speak more than one language, ask yourself: in which language do you find it easier to say ‘I love you’?
The sense of loss, of there being a ‘missing piece’ when one speaks in a different language, can be unnerving. For some, what is lost could be a desirable side of their personality, like being able to exchange small talk or banter confidently. Navigating social interactions might get especially daunting for those who are learning languages in which social roles and hierarchies are embedded in various language forms and structures. In Japanese, for example, verb morphology shifts according to the relative status of the person you are speaking to. When speaking to your boss, you would use polite forms, and when discussing your boss with an external client, you would need to use humbling forms to refer to your superior. These layers of linguistic complexity may leave even advanced learners feeling hyperaware of every word they utter.
Yet, where some experience hesitation, others might see an opportunity for boldness. It’s possible to embrace the diluted emotionality that comes with speaking a second language. This detachment can allow one to break free from the social inhibitions of a first language. I have felt this myself in English. In this language, driven by a ‘why not’ attitude, I found myself stepping onto a stage for the first time and trying out different kinds of performance, eventually landing a theatre gig during my student years. The thought of attempting the same in Italian makes me crumble with anxiety. But in English? The stakes felt lower, and I embraced a side of myself that might never have emerged otherwise.
This sort of detachment might explain why some multilinguals code-switch to a non-native language when using emotionally charged or taboo words. If you speak more than one language, ask yourself: in which language do you find it easier to say ‘I love you’? And in which one do you swear more liberally? For me, cursing in a foreign language feels strangely playful, as if it gives me permission to access a different version of myself, perhaps one less bound by social accountability.
Feeling like another version of yourself seems to be fairly common among those who switch from a native to a non-native language. In one survey of more than 1,000 multilinguals, 65 per cent reported feeling ‘like a different person’ when they used different languages. Prompted for further thoughts, these respondents cited not only different levels of naturalness across their languages, but also differences in the attitudes or perspectives they adopted, their emotionality or expressivity, and other qualities. A person’s level of proficiency and cultural immersion seem to be significant factors: a fluent speaker who is living abroad and constantly exposed to local cultural norms is far more likely to experience this ‘feeling like a different person’ phenomenon.
Bilinguals were rated as more extraverted, assertive and open when using English rather than Cantonese
Research across several languages, countries and cultures has also found evidence of specific personality differences depending on which language someone is using. A landmark study published in 2006 involved Spanish-English bilinguals in the United States and Mexico who took personality tests in both languages. Participants tended to score higher in extraversion, agreeableness and conscientiousness when responding in English – patterns that echoed personality data previously observed in monolingual people from the respective countries. In a more recent example, researchers asked Swedish-English bilinguals to fill out a personality questionnaire for an imaginary job interview, using either Swedish or English, at either a Swedish or American company. In one of these experiments, participants who filled out the questionnaire in English had higher extraversion scores. In a somewhat different experiment that included open-ended interview questions, participants using Swedish rated themselves as more agreeable and conscientious.
While these studies relied on people rating aspects of their own personalities, some research has explored differences in how people are perceived by others depending on the language they use. In one study, Hong Kong Cantonese-English bilinguals spoke with two different interviewers – who varied in terms of their ethnicity and the language they used – and these conversations were observed by external raters. During their conversations with ethnically Chinese interviewers, the bilinguals were rated as more extraverted, assertive and open when using English rather than Cantonese.
This makes me wonder: am I also perceived differently depending on which language I’m speaking? What does my language reveal – or conceal – about who I am? While it is difficult to clearly discern these variations within myself, I have observed them in others. For example, I once misjudged a friend as curt and distant, having interacted with them only in English. It was only when I saw them conversing in their native Chinese that I realised how warm and engaging they truly were. It was as if I were meeting a completely different person.
For many multilinguals who feel like or seem like a different person depending on which language they are using, language and cultural cues might be priming different self-perceptions, triggering shifts in personality trait expression in ways that align with the corresponding linguistic and social environment. For someone who is working in a Taiwanese cultural context and trying to fit in with the way others speak and act, ideals such as loyalty and hard work might become especially salient and something to emphasise in one’s self; whereas, in the US, it might be qualities like assertiveness and initiative. Even as a multilingual person’s core self remains a constant, their present context might change the lens through which they perceive their own identity – including which aspects become amplified or toned down in their mind – as well as how they interact with others.
Wearing different ‘masks’ can transform a potential source of uneasiness into something amusing
In social psychology, tweaking your behaviour based on contextual cues in order to suit community norms has been described as ‘cultural frame switching’. Interacting in a particular language can serve as one of these cues. The cultural frame-switching model also suggests that people with a higher degree of cultural awareness are more susceptible to cultural priming.
How is this cultural awareness developed? Speakers with a higher degree of immersion – those who live abroad or have strong community ties – are more likely to develop ‘pragmatic competence’ in their target language. This kind of competence goes beyond the accurate use of vocabulary and grammar: it involves understanding and using language in socially appropriate ways. It means knowing not just what to say, but also when and how to say it, and being able to predict how it will be received. This is essential for social functioning in the society where a language is spoken, and it is hard to acquire in a classroom context, without authentic interactions with other speakers. Motivation and adaptability are also crucial in this process of internalising new language conventions.
Not everyone is willing to adapt, or to adapt in full. Some language learners deliberately resist adopting certain native-speaker norms – a phenomenon known as ‘pragmatic resistance’. A non-native speaker might understand what native speakers are expected to do and say in certain social situations (such as when accepting an invitation, apologising, or responding to criticism), but still decline to follow these norms. This resistance is not solely about discomfort with a particular norm; it can also be about preserving a sense of authenticity and personal integrity. To give an example: in Taiwan, in some contexts, women are expected to speak in a higher-pitched tone and to punctuate their statements with sentence-final particles (such as 喔 ō, 啦 la, and 耶 yé) that add a coquettish flair to their speech. Doing this never felt natural to me, and, as a result, I have often been told I ‘sound like a man’ in Chinese.
Pragmatic competence and pragmatic resistance are continuously balanced and renegotiated, as multilinguals ‘try on’ different social identities throughout their learning journey. Each social interaction, observation and experience adds to this dynamic, as individuals work out how to move between worlds fluidly – and to dial up or down different aspects of themselves – while remaining sufficiently true to themselves.
Embracing the idea of wearing different ‘masks’ can transform a potential source of uneasiness into something amusing, even empowering. When I was writing my dissertation in Chinese, having to use a language in which I lacked complete fluency freed me from the perfectionism that had always haunted my academic work. What initially felt like a gap in my abilities, a ‘missing piece’, became an opportunity for self-realisation.
The experience of shifting personalities and expressions, while not universal – and certainly not identical for everyone – offers a fascinating glimpse into the human capacity for adaptation. By observing and reflecting on these shifts, multilinguals can turn what might seem like a challenge into an avenue for growth. As they switch between languages, they can approach their interactions with introspection and awareness, each transition potentially unlocking new insights into who they are and who they could be.
