Does your language alter your personality?

Welcome to 2025, and another year of our monthly translation industry updates. Today, we’ll be kicking off the new year by thinking about one of the most interesting topics facing language enthusiasts: namely, whether our personality changes along with the different languages that we use. A lot of cultures hold the belief that each separate language is essentially a separate world, and the more languages we speak, the more worlds, or the more views on the world, we have access to. And when half the global population is at least bilingual, this means that least half of everyone in the world has had the experience of interacting in more than one language, meaning that there’s vast information for us to draw on.

The impact of language on personality is something which is widely discussed on the internet, both anecdotally and academically. Writing in Medium, native Turkish speaker Bahar Pancaroğlu describes being told by an Italian friend that she was ‘much more fun’ in English than in Italian, despite being conversant in both of those languages. And in the same way that others might perceive us differently based on our own interactions in another language, we might have the same impressions of other people, as described in Psyche by Antonella Gismundi, an Italian expat living in Taiwan, who perceived a friend as being ‘distant’ in English, yet ‘warm and engaging’ when speaking in their native Chinese.

But what causes this apparent psychological shift?

Firstly, there’s the argument that we use different languages in different contexts. A lot of people have had to gain proficiency in another language for academic or professional purposes, which might mean operating in a different social environment than the more relaxed and intimate family environment in which their mother tongue is spoken. Those who have become specialists in particular subject areas or moved to a part of the world where the landscape, climate or cultural references are vastly different from at home might also find that they acquire a different vocabulary to describe the new setting they live in, and because how our vocabulary and references condition how we speak, they are likely to impact on other aspects of our communication too.

There’s also an argument to say that the nature of some languages, or the cultural contexts surrounding them, makes them more suited for particular styles of communication. For example, at the risk of stereotyping, English is often viewed as a concise and practical language, whereas other languages may be perceived as being more poetic or more expressive. Writing in The Conversation, Mari Mar Boillos Pereira and Ana Blanco Canales describe how a participants in a study of bilingual English and Chinese speakers in the US reported feeling more comfortable expressing their emotions in English due to the perceived lack of social restrictions in that language, yet actually feeling greater emotional intensity in Mandarin. Meanwhile, research cited in New Scientist describes the opposite effect, whereby bilingual Hispanic women in the US attributed greater assertiveness and self-sufficiency to communication in Spanish compared to in English.

Lastly, there is also an argument to say that shifting our communication styles could be part of the general adaptation process involved with moving to a new environment. After all, if we spend a lot of time away from our place of origin then our attitude to many other social situations such as queueing and personal space changes, so it stands to reason that our use of language would be likely to be influenced by that adaptation process too.

As with any situation in life, there are advantages and drawbacks. Many of us are familiar with the sensation that some essential part of us is missing when we speak in a language we’re not one hundred percent familiar with and we can’t draw on the same sense of idioms and expressions that we can use in our mother tongue. This feeling can be particularly acute when dealing with the most abstract forms of a language, such humour, all of which can lead many people to believe that they’re less witty or entertaining when operating in a non-native language, or even to feel like they’ll never be truly ‘themselves’ when speaking outside of their mother tongue.

On the other hand, it’s fascinating to imagine that using a different language might enable us to tap into a part of ourselves that more commonly lies dormant, while the idea that our mannerisms change with our language is also appealing in the sense that it speaks to a basic human ability to adapt to changing circumstances, while also implying a level of empathy and a willingness to interact with other people on their terms. Operating in other languages has even been linked to better decision-making processes, perhaps due to the distancing from our more emotional selves, so there’s even an argument to say that we gain competence, as well as losing it, when we speak in languages other than our own. And lastly, there’s also an argument to say that our personalities develop and change over our lives, and that if part of our life takes place in other languages then that will become a part of our evolution too.

Many of us operate in a foreign-language environment at least temporarily for a range of different reasons, which means that moving between languages and therefore personalities is an experience that a lot of us are probably familiar with. In fact, the changes are that if you’re reading this article then you might have had this experience too, so we’re keen to know your thoughts. Have you felt like your personality has changed when using another language, and if so, then how did it make you feel?