Bilingual People Can Switch Between Different Personalities

but it’s not as simple as it sounds.

Did you ever have a friend who claimed to feel like a totally different person after having only three French lessons? It turned out that such people simply make this stuff up to look smarter in everyone’s eyes.

Now after I said out loud what everyone already knew it’s time for real facts:

People who fluently speak more than one language have a specific personality for each of them.

Background

The influence of the bilingualism on the human brain isn’t a new topic for scientific society. By now we discovered a ton of proven benefits of knowing two or more languages.

Just to flatter those of you who have a privilege of knowing more than a single one from a small age, including myself — I’ll list a few:

A greater density of grey matter in the brain , which makes it much more capable of coding new information.

, which makes it much more capable of coding new information. Lesser probability of having an Alzheimer or Dementia. According to the study, bilingual people start to experience these diseases 5 years later in life than their monolingual counterparts.

According to the study, bilingual people start to experience these diseases 5 years later in life than their monolingual counterparts. A better understanding of your primary language. A conscious process of learning an extra language gives a better understanding of the linguistic structure and morphology in general. It results in a deeper understanding of the language you speak the most.

It’s quite clear that knowing more languages results in having a better brain condition, but it wasn’t always like that. Back in 60-s psychologists believed that learning a new language can actually make kids dumber.

They backed it up with the fact that the cognitive abilities of kids during the language shift were markedly decreasing but such genius conclusions were possible only in 60-s when LSD was broadly used to treat depression…

Personality Switch

But what’s about the different personalities?

Let’s start with the fact that there are three types of bilingual (or multilingual) people:

Compound bilinguals. These are people who use two or more languages from their birth and as a result, have several linguistic codes simultaneously. Coordinate bilinguals. These are people who were speaking a single language at birth but learned a second one during the early stages of development (teenage to mid-twenties). As a result, they can easily shift between linguistic codes but there’s a dominant ‘native’ one. Subordinate bilinguals. These are people who didn’t speak a second language to the later stages of life. After learning it in the adult age, they still have a single linguistic code, and filter the ‘alien’ language through it.

Timing and conditions for those types may be individual but that’s highly unlikely that you will become a compound bilingual by learning a second language at the age of 40.

And I’m using ‘highly unlikely’ instead of ‘impossible’ just so as not to kill your hope in case you have one.

Compound and Coordinate bilinguals are prone to have different personalities for every language they know. It’s possible because in the process of learning their brain is still very plastic due to the young age, so they use a lot of their right hemisphere — which is primarily in charge of emotional perception.

It means that they acquire an emotional connection with a language and develop their own distinct character in it, not just learn a set of words and grammar rules.

Every language has its own peculiar tones and shades, so by matching your persona with the nature of the language you simply go through the process of adaptation.

For example, I am a native Ukrainian and Russian speaker, who started to speak English at the age of 6. And I know for sure that the way I communicate, think, and act in my native languages is much different from my English-language part.

I’m not forcing it, it’s just a natural reflex. Usually, I need from 5 to 10 minutes to switch but after my brain lag ends I don’t use a single unit of energy to be a ‘different me’.