Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

Short answer? Yes, you certainly can be.

A friend of mine is a foul-mouthed dirty scoundrel when he speaks Portuguese with Brazilian friends (where he grew up for half his childhood), a normally-swearing Texan cowboy when he speaks with American friends (where he went to college), and a swear-words-have-never-touched-my-lips gentleman when he speaks received pronunciation with his British friends (other half of childhood in London).

He's the same person... but entirely different people.

Another anecdote, when I taught English in Brazil, I had one adult student, a lawyer, who was entirely serious and down-to-business with a deeper voice when speaking her native Portuguese, but in English she spoke like a little girl, at a much higher pitch, and a much sunnier personality.

But on the other hand, another very multi-lingual friend of mine is exactly the same person in every language -- same attitude, same swearing, same everything.

So not sure what it says about your personality... or personalities... :)

I believe, at least for your anecdotes, that this has less to do with language, and more to do with context.

We all speak (and behave) differently when we are with our parents, our colleagues and our friends - and arguably online, even when speaking in our native tongue in all these (and other) scenarios.

That is not to say that certain languages don't lend themselves better to certain forms of expression, but I'm not convinced your anecdotes support that argument.

Anecdote, but I speak Japanese and English both as native languages (learned them simultaneously growing up). I definitely have different personalities in each language, and can attest to both there contextual influences (working in bigcorp Jalan does things to you) and also that inherent influences of the language mechanisms. Japanese is grammatically and structurally built with a control and deference mechanism.

I also speak Japanese and English, but I learned Japanese while living in Japan in my 20's. Did you grow up in Japan or in a western country? I'm wondering if, as the blog post implies, that the situation/period in life in which you learn the language changes your personality in that language.

I grew up in California, in a household speaking Japanese at home, and going to two schools at the same time: one American school 5 days a week, one Japanese school all day Saturday following the Japanese government curriculum (it was mainly for students going back to Japan after their families' overseas work assignment was over).

All my friends were Japanese until middle school, and my social life was dominated by Japanese. Definitely didn't fit into American elementary school at all and was a problem student.

But then I stopped going to Japanese school in HS, and then figured out how to excel in American school, met likeminded friends for the first time, etc.

Then I went to work at a Japanese megacorp in my early 20's.

It's a strange mix of time spent using the language.

Do you like that you grew up getting to know two cultures, or do you wish it had been different? Growing up bilingual sounds super cool to me, but people who actually did it often tend to sound less excited about it.

Mixed feelings.

In a vacuum, it's a net positive to be able to understand an additional language very well. But I've felt that my life would be easier in Japan if I were "more foreign", since I wouldn't be subjected to the expectations of a domestic person while actually internally being a foreigner.

Also I'm convinced that had I spent the resources that would put towards Japanese into English, I would have become much more proficient at English earlier in my life. That would have translated into better verbal test scores, and may have meant I wouldn't have had such a hard time in my younger years in school. Then again plenty of solo-English speakers of the shy nerd bretheren have problems at school of not fitting in, so this isn't only a language issue.

Honestly it's just a grass is greener type of situation. It's brought me great advantages (I wouldn't be doing my current company without this advantage, and I genuinely think the language is a beautiful and sonorous one, and the cultural traditions are admirable), but it's also held me back in many ways compared to my 100% American English peers as well.

> Japanese is grammatically and structurally built with a control and deference mechanism.

Practically every English speaker I know who speaks Japanese well has a HUGE mode shift when changing into and out of Japanese.

And it's oddly specific to Japanese. It doesn't seem to be a language difficulty issue as this doesn't seem to hold for the people who speak Chinese (Mandarin or Cantonese) or Korean.

I feel that to be true too. It's more that different languages correlate with a different context more than the language itself leads to a different understanding of things.

It's the old mistake of taking correlation for causation.

Not entirely. I swear a lot more in English than I do in (my native) Russian, even when audience and social context are the same. I'm pretty sure that's pure conditioning - Russian profanities literally make me wince every time, because that was drilled thoroughly into me as a kid. English ones got acquired much later, and are "just words".

I was at a meeting a couple years ago that got a bit intense. It was being done mostly in Hungarian but I was really struggling to follow since my Hungarian is so poor so a guy switched to English for me for a bit. But he was swearing so much I could feel myself getting really tense. If he was a native speaker I would be getting ready for fists to fly. I had to keep reminding myself that to him these were just more English words.

Did you not read the article, or even the thing you replied to? Languages can imply context, that's the point.

Agree. As someone switching between Spanish, English and German (native) daily, it is for me at least mostly about context not language.

Not necessarily parents, colleagues, friends but cultural differences between countries/regions. I'm a Swiss living in Colombia. When I speak Spanish here my talking style differs quite a bit from home, because I'm adapting the local customs. But I'm still me. I can't think of anything I would do or not do, deem good or bad, just because I'm using another language.

Where language comes in is more in personally projection. Because of different forms of expression which are not 1:1 mappings and also because I'm not as eloquent as in my native tongue, you might think I have different personalities.

On the other hands I have several Finnish personality "traits" although I don't speak the language. But my mother is from Finland and I grew up with plenty influence of her culture.

I suspect, that if the language spoken has influence on the personality it is rather small or entirely emergent from the associated culture and time of life we learnt/used it.

Is this really the different country with the different language, or "just" the other people?

As far as I know, everybody behaves differently towards old school friends than towards later friends, colleagues at work, their spouse, and so on.

How can we eliminate this effect? A study would need to observe the same group of people, all multilingual, in different langauges. It would be interesting to see whether these behave differently depending on the language (or mix of languages) they use.

But I personally doubt it. I believe it is "just" the people.

My own personal experience closely aligns with this.

I think of languages as musical instruments. Of course nearly anything can be played on nearly anything, but the character of each is entirely different, and the way one plays or composes for each is going to differ significantly.

I'm still me when speaking different languages, but each language I use is going to convey that differently, and bring out different sides of my nature.

Could you possibly be confusing speech patterns with personality traits? I.e., someone speaking in a girly high-pitched voice doesn't necessarily have or display a sunnier personality, it could be just your own perception. And that perception could potentially be wrong.

Isn't this what in linguistics people call 'code-switching'? It's a contextual and cultural thing. Just like when people go into formal settings like an interview for a white collar job, they tone down the swearing --but ight turn it up once they meet with colleagues at a bar.

no. code switching is mixing multiple languages, often in a single sentence.

That's one definition, but it has expanded into "Both in popular usage and in sociolinguistic study, the name code-switching is sometimes used to refer to switching among dialects, styles or registers" according to(1)

(1)http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/04/08/176064688/...

I think language might be piggybacking off cultural norms and expectations as well.

For example (generalization incoming) in Portugal the farther north you go, the looser tongues get. People from Lisbon (central Portugal) and down south are far more proper and don't curse as much.

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