Ok, no. I do not suffer from Dissociative identity disorder. I am still myself, except that it doesn’t feel like my regular self nor do I sound the same (besides the obvious changes from one language to the other).
Let me start by saying I am from Venezuela, thus my mother tongue being Spanish. I had some English classes during High School, but it really just taught me the very ground basis. It wasn’t until I turned 17 that I took an English course in the USA for a whole year, which led with me getting back home to teach English for almost 6 years already.
Along the way I decided to study Portuguese (I haven’t reached proficiency there yet, despite being so easy for me; one day I will) and also French, which I started giving classes to a group of colleagues very recently. I will describe how I feel mostly between English and Spanish, as they are the languages I know the most and where I feel there is a bigger impact when my person is compared with one and the other.
As I was saying, Spanish was pretty much the only language I knew until I turned 17 years old. I am 23 now, and I used to be a very shy person back then. Seriously.
It was difficult for me to deal with most of society’s interactions, especially coming from such a unique culture like the one in Venezuela. To give you an example, this culture is one that incites you to be loud, want to dance salsa and merengue at every party, be an extrovert most of the times, etc.
Well, I could do none of the above. It was especially difficult for me to speak out my mind whether it was in an unfair situation for me, or to express my feelings towards a girl or even my mom! I would always keep those things to myself. One of the things I believe conditioned such reactions was the fact I didn´t hang out with my friends too often, and because of my personality, I didn’t try to do so either. It was a circle. It might just have been a matter of maturity, but in a while you will see something very interesting.
So, I was once a shy boy who received a call from his awesome uncle saying:
“Jorge, you are going to the States to learn English for 9 months within two months.”
I just replied: “Sure!” (I wasn’t very talkative either).
Once there, the first thing I realized during my first week is that I was now on my own, sharing a room with three other roommates who did not speak Spanish, so English was the only way to communicate to each other. The environment is great, and so is the learning process. I could barely use Spanish within those 9 months and at the end I felt like I learned English… and much more.
Those were times of some adventures where I felt that for the first time of my life I could just be myself. I could socialize, talk to girls, be active in parties, I could even dance now! I felt like I could just simply do anything if I set my mind to it, and I ultimately fell in love with English.
To an extent that once I got back home, I sent my CV to the very next English academy I found in my hometown and then opened my own academy three years later. My English was much better now, thanks to some methods I would love to share in upcoming posts, and realized that ever since I learned it, I spent most part of my days using English than Spanish!!
And here is where the weird stuff started o happen: I noticed I was a lot less expressive and resourceful when using my mother tongue than when using English.
I was much clumsier, slower and especially less confident in Spanish now. English was now where I felt the most comfortable and I have a crazy theory about why…
I will start by quoting an article in The Economist by writer R.L.G., called: “Johnson: Do different languages confer different personalities?”
“…Significantly, most people are not symmetrically bilingual. Many have learned one language at home from parents, and another later in life, usually at school. So bilinguals usually have different strengths and weaknesses in their different languages—and they are not always best in their first language…” “… But even for a speaker whose two languages are very nearly the same in ability, there is another big reason that person will feel different in the two languages. This is because there is an important distinction between bilingualism and biculturalism.”
“Many bilinguals are not bicultural. But some are. And of those bicultural bilinguals, we should be little surprised that they feel different in their two languages. Experiments in psychology have shown the power of “priming”—small unnoticed factors that can affect behaviour in big ways. Asking people to tell a happy story, for example, will put them in a better mood. The choice between two languages is a huge prime. Speaking Spanish rather than English, for a bilingual and bicultural Puerto Rican in New York, might conjure feelings of family and home. Switching to English might prime the same person to think of school and work.”
This information might help us approach to a hypothesis that languages can bring up different feelings to us depending on the circumstances we learn them. Probably different personality features could be acquired during this process, but I do not have the evidence to sustain such a claim, but it definitely suits my experience.
I haven’t much of a mention on the fact each language requires a whole different cultural background. It’s not possible to get to a level of proficiency of a language without understanding the cultural factor for that’s precisely what gives them their complexity, as it is not only a matter of translating words and using grammar, but about understanding the lives of those people who speak it.
