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Switching languages, switching personalities
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Interesting article from Yahoo news:
Switching languages can also switch personality: study
Tue Jun 24, 11:33 AM ET
NEW YORK (Reuters Life!) - People who are bicultural and speak two languages may unconsciously change their personality when they switch languages, according to a U.S. study.
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Researchers David Luna from Baruch College and Torsten Ringberg and Laura A. Peracchio from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee studied groups of Hispanic women, all of whom were bilingual, but with varying degrees of cultural identification.
They found significant changes in self perception or “frame-shifting” in bicultural participants — women who participate in both Latino and Anglo culture.
“Language can be a cue that activates different culture-specific frames,” the researchers said in a study published in the Journal of Consumer Research.
While frame-shifting has been studied before, they said this research found that people who are bicultural switched frames more quickly and easily than people who are bilingual but living in one culture.
The researchers said the women classified themselves as more assertive when they spoke Spanish than when they spoke English.
“In the Spanish-language sessions, informants perceived females as more self-sufficient and extroverted,” they said.
In one of the studies, a group of bilingual U.S. Hispanic women viewed advertisements that featured women in different scenarios. The participants saw the ads in one language - English or Spanish - and then, six months later, they viewed the same ads in the other language.
Their perceptions of themselves and of the women in the ads shifted depending on the language.
“One respondent, for example, saw an ad’s main character as a risk-taking, independent woman in the Spanish version of the ad, but as a hopeless, lonely, confused woman in the English version,” said the researchers.
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June 28th, 2008 at 2:18 am
My personality may change when I switch languages, because I’ve only studied French in high school (haven’t lived in a Francophone nation or been in a situation where I was outnumbered by Francophones) so I don’t know slang terms and can’t really swear like I do in English. As far as Japanese, I used to speak it on the exact level as I spoke English, but since I’ve been away from Japan for some time now, my Japanese vocabulary hasn’t grown the way my English vocab has, and it’s harder for me to make complex sentences, which I can do with ease in English. Additionally, I haven’t mastered sarcasm in Japanese or French, and that’s a pretty major part of who I am. I am told though, by Japanese people that I act Japanese and by English speakers that I act American. So I guess my personality does change…
Either that or they’re just seeing the parts of me that they can identify with and ignoring the other parts.
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June 28th, 2008 at 7:19 am
For me it is not just languages, but at times accents too.
Mostly it depends on where I am, or who I am with. You notice it more with language changes, but that is mostly because the difference tends to be more stark in contrast, than an accent or a place.
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June 28th, 2008 at 6:47 pm
Hi Jackrabbit,
this is Buttercup, we chatted a while ago. I just bought “Third Culture Kids” by Ruth Reken and David Pollock. It is considered the definitive book on TCKs. I think you would greatly benefit from reading this book. I got it used on Amazon. I have only read a few chapters but already have a lump in my throat. Check it out!
buttercup
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