I speak 5 languages, 2 learned as toddler, other 3 later. I’ve never noticed any change in personality, an nobody ever reported that.
There is a little tendency for gentleness in English, maybe, because the source I learned it from was extremely polite. But I would attribute that to the source of learning, not the language.
> I should say that I've exerienced this. Any time Rachel[5] and I arrive in Paris, I visibly see her personality shift. It's small, it's subtle, but it's definitely there.
In my experience I would say being in a completely different environment is here much more important than the spoken language, by far! Drawing any conclusions from that sentence, is really… Exaggerated?
Yes, I've observed personality changes within myself even depending on which programming language I use. JavaScript, for example, seems to make me much more inclined to use expletives and pull out my hair...
I'm at the point of learning German that it's starting to get interesting.
One thing is that when you begin a sentence, to get the grammar correct sometimes you need to know what comes at the end of the sentence, along with understanding the context in which nouns are used.
For example "the blue dog". In German if you said "I pat the blue dog" it would actually change to something like "I pat then bluen dog", whereas "I am the blue dog" wouldn't have the "-n" endings on the word "the" and "blue".
Once you change the word "dog" for "cat" then the endings on the words "the" and "blue" change, because every noun in German has a different gender (masculine, feminine, neuter), and the words endings in a sentence can change based on the particular gender and context they're used in.
Anyway, this is a long way of saying - you need to know what you're talking about BEFORE you begin!
In English we have the luxury of kind of making it up as we go. If we decide last minute that we're not patting a blue dog, but are patting a blue cat then that's simple, we just change the noun at the end once we get to it. In German you need to have that noun info upfront, otherwise you might not get the grammar correct!
>In German you need to have that noun info upfront, otherwise you might not get the grammar correct!
In reality, (1) people rarely change their mind about what noun they're going to use such that the gender is different, and (2) when it needs to be done, speakers of German either ignore it or just go back and repair what they said, changing the forms of the determiner and adjective. Germans speak with no more planning than English speakers.
One might say the same thing about certain English grammatical phenomena. When asking a question, you have to consider whether the subject is going to be singular or plural: Is/are the dog/dogs hungry? This isn't needed in languages without subject-verb agreement, such as Swedish. But it makes very little difference to native speakers.
I agree. Is Spanish, chair vs stool is a better example because some objects are in between and you may change your classification on the fly.
People will ignore the error most of the time unles you make too many of them. In that case they will assume you are a foreigner and ignore the errors anyway.
It's not so much about changing your mind, but rather more that as a learner of German, you have to do a bit more upfront thinking, and be more considerate of the thing you're talking about.
For example, "can you pass me the X" is straightforward in English, but requires a bit more thinking / planning in German where you have to consider "what gender is X, and what case is it in?".
Of course for a native speaker this is for the most part automatic. For someone learning though, it emphasises objects in a way that you didn't have to before. All of a sudden every item is distinct, has an additional attribute and must be used in a specific way.
but you probably mean "Ich streichle den blauen Hund" ("I pat the blue dog")
as apposed to
"I pat then bluen dog"
(the latter seems incorrect in both English and German) ?
could you give another example maybe? I think you're on to something but petting the cat or dog seems to have an identical sentence structure in English and German. Only difference being sex. That's true in Italian, German, French, Spanish, and gets even worse with Slavic languages (or some non European languages).
I purposefully gave the example in germinglish - it's neither German or English but the point is to explain to English speakers how the words in an English sentence would change if applying the same logic to the English language.
Yeah, “den vs denn”, “dass vs das” can be a bit confusing for le foreigner, indeed. I suggest learning Russian next. You’ll finally understand what language can really do in brains (vs minds). And then Japanese … “et boom, c’est le choc.”
Shit like ‘Turkish’ and ‘Italian’ can be neglected, not much to understand about submission, obedience and how to ruin your children from a very young age.
In my experience, learning a second language to a high level involves some amount of disassociation. Only people I know without this experience spoke both languages from a very early age usually at home. So this tracks.
But there can be other factors as well. For example in social contexts can change sharply between languages. The way I talk with my family is very different from the way I speak professionally—at home I'm the youngest and at work I'm the boss.
I think your second paragraph is it. I myself and people I know learned different languages from the begging, from different persons. E.g. Portuguese from the great mother, Spanish from mother. Those are completely different relations, and they express themselves in the learned language.
There is every chance the 3 weeks also changed personality as well. Two further groups are required for English and 3 week later English and Germany and 3 weeks later German to compare personality drift over time. I am not saying it might produce any results but we are trying to prove ourselves wrong (because in science you can't prove yourself right) and as such with the hypothesis that personality is not impacted by language and we have introduced time to remove short term memory of the test we have to think about its potential impact too.
Would be interesting to do the tests back to back as well, if we think short term memory of the test impacts it that would also be worth testing in both orders to see if one test influences the other.
It would be interesting to see these sort of studies done in India where multilingualism is the norm. I grew up learning 4 languages and have noticed a definite change in my tone/assertiveness/attitude/thought patterns when i shift languages.
That last bit about his wife acting different in Paris interesting to me for a different reason. I’ve noticed that certain cities seem to affect my personality in different ways. For instance in NYC I feel I’m more assertive.
NYC citizens have a particular reputation, it would make sense if psychologically you were motivated to be more assertive by your knowledge of that reputation.
Indeed - so we have two examples of behavior modification possibly attributable to the person's awareness of being in a different culture than before. If that is the case (which, we should note, is not established by these anecdotes) then it seems plausible that a switch in language could also trigger the same response, if the languages are associated, at least in that person's mind, with different cultural norms.
We can also wonder if something subtle was changed in translation, and I think it would be interesting if we could follow up by showing each of the experiment's subjects the two sets of questions side-by-side, and ask them whether they feel each pair is asking exactly the same question.
I have been reading John McWhorter's 'Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue' (strongly recommended), and only yesterday I read this passage:
"In German, one example [of the little complexities that creep into all languages] is a passel of little words that convey nuances of personal attitude. Using them is indispensable to sounding like an actual human being in the language - and mastering them is only possible via a year or more's exposure to the spoken language. Do you have your socks? is, in a vanilla sense, Hast du deine Socken? But you can also stick in the word auch - Hast du auch deine Socken? - in which case the sentence conveys "You have your socks, don't you?" In this usage, auch conveys a subtle, personal note of warning, impatience, correction..."
I am in no position to vouch for McWhorter's claim here, but his translation of the second version shows that this sort of nuance is present in idiomatic English.
I have just realized that this post is a sort of preemptive response to any suggestion that the outcome reported in the article is explicable only as an example of the strong Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.
Coordinate bilingualism seems like when you're learning languages separately and consciously, later in life. You can still acquire high fluency, but it doesn't seem as 'native' as it might be as if you acquired it during childhood and unconsciously.
> - Coordinate bilingualism: When two languages are learned in different contexts and maintained as separate systems
This has to be extremely rare in today's connected world. For example our kid always went to british colleges while wife and I are native french speakers... but there's always been lots of english at home. We watch all our news and educational vids in english. We had our kid watch TV in english since the beginning (on purpose). So the "english as school / french at home" separation wasn't clear. (technically our kid did learn three languages and she was fluent in spanish for she lived for five years in Spain but then she "lost" it, even though she still understands spanish fine).
I mean: there's this thing that exists now and that is called the Internet and it happens to be quite ubiquitous, even in the third world. So I don't think a kid could ever be only exposed to one language at home, to a second language somewhere else (at school?) and yet parents would have missed the Internet revolution so much that they wouldn't even "compound" both languages at home? Parents stuck in the 18th century if you ask me. Even at a very young age there's already some "homework": it needs to be done, at home, in the language used at school. Youtube vids. AI voice assistants now. These things are simply a reality.
As TFA says anyway: it's even disputed if coordinate and compound distinction even exists at all.
> This has to be extremely rare in today's connected world.
I'm unsure how Internet and today's connected world is related to coordinate bilingualism. As an example of how coordinate bilingualism happens, my gf will speak to her mother in Kirundi most of the time. However, they both have the same job and when the discussion is work-related, they switch to French because of all the technical language that is in French, even though Kirundi is their native language.
Another example, my mother-in-law, again, will mostly speak in Kirundi with her siblings. However, when she or one of her siblings is recounting a story or a memory, they will switch to Swahili even if it's a second, or maybe third, language. She says that Swahili is "better" for storytelling and it's done naturally without thinking about it.
If you want a third example, for me there is a clear separation between French and English. To me, English is the language for internet forum and get access to more entertainments. It is definitely not a language that was ever used at home or work or that I was exposed to at home, not one time in the last four decades. And no, I don't live in the 18th century nor I missed Internet revolution. But again my brain isn't so colonized I'd send my kids to an English speaking school.
What's the point of having education in English? I get that fluency is useful, but it's just a fallback default, I don't see what the additive elements would be. Or are English versions of resources substantially better than that in your primary language?
I speak 5 languages, 2 learned as toddler, other 3 later. I’ve never noticed any change in personality, an nobody ever reported that.
There is a little tendency for gentleness in English, maybe, because the source I learned it from was extremely polite. But I would attribute that to the source of learning, not the language.
> I should say that I've exerienced this. Any time Rachel[5] and I arrive in Paris, I visibly see her personality shift. It's small, it's subtle, but it's definitely there.
In my experience I would say being in a completely different environment is here much more important than the spoken language, by far! Drawing any conclusions from that sentence, is really… Exaggerated?
That's a valid question, but I also see the change when she starts speaking French with people here. So it's not the location.
At least, it's not just the location. That may play a part, but it also happens otherwise.
I agree that drawing strong conclusions without controlling for environmental factors could lead to overgeneralization
Yes, I've observed personality changes within myself even depending on which programming language I use. JavaScript, for example, seems to make me much more inclined to use expletives and pull out my hair...
Writing Python feels like having a friendly chat
How does using Pip feel?
I'm at the point of learning German that it's starting to get interesting.
One thing is that when you begin a sentence, to get the grammar correct sometimes you need to know what comes at the end of the sentence, along with understanding the context in which nouns are used.
For example "the blue dog". In German if you said "I pat the blue dog" it would actually change to something like "I pat then bluen dog", whereas "I am the blue dog" wouldn't have the "-n" endings on the word "the" and "blue".
Once you change the word "dog" for "cat" then the endings on the words "the" and "blue" change, because every noun in German has a different gender (masculine, feminine, neuter), and the words endings in a sentence can change based on the particular gender and context they're used in.
Anyway, this is a long way of saying - you need to know what you're talking about BEFORE you begin!
In English we have the luxury of kind of making it up as we go. If we decide last minute that we're not patting a blue dog, but are patting a blue cat then that's simple, we just change the noun at the end once we get to it. In German you need to have that noun info upfront, otherwise you might not get the grammar correct!
>In German you need to have that noun info upfront, otherwise you might not get the grammar correct!
In reality, (1) people rarely change their mind about what noun they're going to use such that the gender is different, and (2) when it needs to be done, speakers of German either ignore it or just go back and repair what they said, changing the forms of the determiner and adjective. Germans speak with no more planning than English speakers.
One might say the same thing about certain English grammatical phenomena. When asking a question, you have to consider whether the subject is going to be singular or plural: Is/are the dog/dogs hungry? This isn't needed in languages without subject-verb agreement, such as Swedish. But it makes very little difference to native speakers.
I agree. Is Spanish, chair vs stool is a better example because some objects are in between and you may change your classification on the fly.
People will ignore the error most of the time unles you make too many of them. In that case they will assume you are a foreigner and ignore the errors anyway.
It's not so much about changing your mind, but rather more that as a learner of German, you have to do a bit more upfront thinking, and be more considerate of the thing you're talking about.
For example, "can you pass me the X" is straightforward in English, but requires a bit more thinking / planning in German where you have to consider "what gender is X, and what case is it in?".
Of course for a native speaker this is for the most part automatic. For someone learning though, it emphasises objects in a way that you didn't have to before. All of a sudden every item is distinct, has an additional attribute and must be used in a specific way.
My native language is Italian, which also changes suffixes based on number and gender.
(And I live in Germany since 2014 to boot)
I really think you are trying to draw conclusions about something that happens when learning most if not every language.
Example for English: https://www.gingersoftware.com/content/grammar-rules/adjecti...
not a native speaker,
but you probably mean "Ich streichle den blauen Hund" ("I pat the blue dog")
as apposed to
(the latter seems incorrect in both English and German) ?could you give another example maybe? I think you're on to something but petting the cat or dog seems to have an identical sentence structure in English and German. Only difference being sex. That's true in Italian, German, French, Spanish, and gets even worse with Slavic languages (or some non European languages).
I purposefully gave the example in germinglish - it's neither German or English but the point is to explain to English speakers how the words in an English sentence would change if applying the same logic to the English language.
Yeah, “den vs denn”, “dass vs das” can be a bit confusing for le foreigner, indeed. I suggest learning Russian next. You’ll finally understand what language can really do in brains (vs minds). And then Japanese … “et boom, c’est le choc.”
Shit like ‘Turkish’ and ‘Italian’ can be neglected, not much to understand about submission, obedience and how to ruin your children from a very young age.
wait, those languages has things about submission and obedience embedded in grammar?
In my experience, learning a second language to a high level involves some amount of disassociation. Only people I know without this experience spoke both languages from a very early age usually at home. So this tracks.
But there can be other factors as well. For example in social contexts can change sharply between languages. The way I talk with my family is very different from the way I speak professionally—at home I'm the youngest and at work I'm the boss.
I think your second paragraph is it. I myself and people I know learned different languages from the begging, from different persons. E.g. Portuguese from the great mother, Spanish from mother. Those are completely different relations, and they express themselves in the learned language.
Yep, for many, different languages are often "reserved" for specific settings
There is every chance the 3 weeks also changed personality as well. Two further groups are required for English and 3 week later English and Germany and 3 weeks later German to compare personality drift over time. I am not saying it might produce any results but we are trying to prove ourselves wrong (because in science you can't prove yourself right) and as such with the hypothesis that personality is not impacted by language and we have introduced time to remove short term memory of the test we have to think about its potential impact too.
Would be interesting to do the tests back to back as well, if we think short term memory of the test impacts it that would also be worth testing in both orders to see if one test influences the other.
It would be interesting to see these sort of studies done in India where multilingualism is the norm. I grew up learning 4 languages and have noticed a definite change in my tone/assertiveness/attitude/thought patterns when i shift languages.
I speak 4 languages and my Dutch personality comes through in all of them.
There's some interesting effects on decision making. I wrote about it here, for anyone curious:
Do we act differently in a foreign language? https://lingoh.news/do-we-act-differently-in-a-foreign-langu...
Does language influence how we think? https://lingoh.news/does-language-influence-how-we-think
That last bit about his wife acting different in Paris interesting to me for a different reason. I’ve noticed that certain cities seem to affect my personality in different ways. For instance in NYC I feel I’m more assertive.
To me it seems obvious that the environment is likely to change our behaviours somewhat if not more than that
That's because in NYC, you'll get run over if you're not assertive.
NYC citizens have a particular reputation, it would make sense if psychologically you were motivated to be more assertive by your knowledge of that reputation.
Indeed - so we have two examples of behavior modification possibly attributable to the person's awareness of being in a different culture than before. If that is the case (which, we should note, is not established by these anecdotes) then it seems plausible that a switch in language could also trigger the same response, if the languages are associated, at least in that person's mind, with different cultural norms.
We can also wonder if something subtle was changed in translation, and I think it would be interesting if we could follow up by showing each of the experiment's subjects the two sets of questions side-by-side, and ask them whether they feel each pair is asking exactly the same question.
I have been reading John McWhorter's 'Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue' (strongly recommended), and only yesterday I read this passage:
"In German, one example [of the little complexities that creep into all languages] is a passel of little words that convey nuances of personal attitude. Using them is indispensable to sounding like an actual human being in the language - and mastering them is only possible via a year or more's exposure to the spoken language. Do you have your socks? is, in a vanilla sense, Hast du deine Socken? But you can also stick in the word auch - Hast du auch deine Socken? - in which case the sentence conveys "You have your socks, don't you?" In this usage, auch conveys a subtle, personal note of warning, impatience, correction..."
I am in no position to vouch for McWhorter's claim here, but his translation of the second version shows that this sort of nuance is present in idiomatic English.
I have just realized that this post is a sort of preemptive response to any suggestion that the outcome reported in the article is explicable only as an example of the strong Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.
Language can act as a "frame" through which we express ourselves, almost like stepping into a different character
The three types of bilingualism mentioned in the article:
- Coordinate bilingualism: When two languages are learned in different contexts and maintained as separate systems
- Compound bilingualism: When two languages are learned in the same context and blended together cognitively
- Simultaneous bilingualism: When two languages are acquired from birth to age 3, with mostly equal emphasis given to both languages
And there are others: successive, balanced, additive, subtractive
Coordinate bilingualism seems like when you're learning languages separately and consciously, later in life. You can still acquire high fluency, but it doesn't seem as 'native' as it might be as if you acquired it during childhood and unconsciously.
> - Coordinate bilingualism: When two languages are learned in different contexts and maintained as separate systems
This has to be extremely rare in today's connected world. For example our kid always went to british colleges while wife and I are native french speakers... but there's always been lots of english at home. We watch all our news and educational vids in english. We had our kid watch TV in english since the beginning (on purpose). So the "english as school / french at home" separation wasn't clear. (technically our kid did learn three languages and she was fluent in spanish for she lived for five years in Spain but then she "lost" it, even though she still understands spanish fine).
I mean: there's this thing that exists now and that is called the Internet and it happens to be quite ubiquitous, even in the third world. So I don't think a kid could ever be only exposed to one language at home, to a second language somewhere else (at school?) and yet parents would have missed the Internet revolution so much that they wouldn't even "compound" both languages at home? Parents stuck in the 18th century if you ask me. Even at a very young age there's already some "homework": it needs to be done, at home, in the language used at school. Youtube vids. AI voice assistants now. These things are simply a reality.
As TFA says anyway: it's even disputed if coordinate and compound distinction even exists at all.
> This has to be extremely rare in today's connected world.
I'm unsure how Internet and today's connected world is related to coordinate bilingualism. As an example of how coordinate bilingualism happens, my gf will speak to her mother in Kirundi most of the time. However, they both have the same job and when the discussion is work-related, they switch to French because of all the technical language that is in French, even though Kirundi is their native language.
Another example, my mother-in-law, again, will mostly speak in Kirundi with her siblings. However, when she or one of her siblings is recounting a story or a memory, they will switch to Swahili even if it's a second, or maybe third, language. She says that Swahili is "better" for storytelling and it's done naturally without thinking about it.
If you want a third example, for me there is a clear separation between French and English. To me, English is the language for internet forum and get access to more entertainments. It is definitely not a language that was ever used at home or work or that I was exposed to at home, not one time in the last four decades. And no, I don't live in the 18th century nor I missed Internet revolution. But again my brain isn't so colonized I'd send my kids to an English speaking school.
What's the point of having education in English? I get that fluency is useful, but it's just a fallback default, I don't see what the additive elements would be. Or are English versions of resources substantially better than that in your primary language?