Linguistic Personae

Published by

Clarissa

December 17, 2013

Reader Kathleen asks:

I know you mentioned this in passing before…something about different personality traits being expressed by one person when that person speaks a different language? Could you expound on that a little bit? Did you do a post about it and I missed it? I am terribly interested.

After 6, 092 posts, I have no idea what I have written, so if I’m repeating myself, please forgive me. I definitely have a different persona for each of the languages I speak well.

The Russian-speaking Clarissa has the best sense of humor of all. (You are missing some linguistic brilliance, people.) I use a lot of puns and verbal acrobatics. My Russian is very adverbial. I never managed to perceive Russian as fully my own and treat it like a stranger I will never fully comprehend. Since I’m not emotionally attached to it a whole lot, I welcome a lot of experimentation with the language and eagerly adopt neologisms. Russian is very poor vocabulary-wise, so I invent many new words and use a variety of suffixes (not prefixes, though) to enrich it and create my own version of the language.

The English-speaking Clarissa is the least emotional of all. My English-speaking persona is the most competent and organized. I feel very protective of English and suffer almost physiologically when people mutilate it.

The Spanish-speaking Clarissa gesticulates a lot, swears a lot, and is either emotional or mumbly (which are simply two sides of the same coin.) Also, Spanish makes me feel manly. It’s hard for me to figure out why that is but I really feel like a man when I speak the language.

Do you have different personae for the languages you speak?

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8 responses to “Linguistic Personae”

good enough cook

December 17, 2013

I wish I was sufficiently conversant in a second language to have an answer to your question! I spent a year speaking French (badly) and was alarmed to discover just how much of my social self was based on being able to use language cleverly. Strip that away, and there wasn’t much left (or so if felt to me, much to my dismay). But that’s an experience I probably would have had with immersion in any foreign language. I know you’re not a big fan of the sort of social science research that confirms what people already know, but FWIW a friend of mine studies the multiple languages/multiple selves phenomenon and has written about it: http://applij.oxfordjournals.org/content/30/4/612.extract (extract from a review of her book)

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Kathleen

December 17, 2013

I am more honest and brave in Spanish than I am in English. I don’t know why, exactly. It’s a strange side effect and can get me into trouble sometimes.

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Z

December 18, 2013

I do not suffer from anxiety in Portuguese. I am the most neurotic in English.

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Ol.

December 19, 2013

French is like Russian for you, with the wittiness and the neologisms and all. Unfortunately, I am also cruel in French. I am anxious and shy in English. In Spanish I am at my most rational and clearest. Portuguese is the language of unabashed (is this even a word?) happiness.

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1. bloggerclarissa
  
  December 19, 2013
  
  I’m sure you can be perfectly cruel in any language. 🙂 (This is a compliment).
  
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Ol.

December 19, 2013

I am pretty sure we talked about this before, and I wonder whether our personalities have changed since then. Mine probably did.

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Stille (@aperfectbalance)

December 19, 2013

I am a far more private person in Romanian than I am in English. I’m also more aggressive in English, and I play with the English language more than I do with Romanian. It’s quite obvious to me why these differences exist too; I learned (and mostly spoke) Romanian from my parents, who had some rather fixed ideas of what I should be and do, whereas I learned an enormous part of my English from the books, music and greater Internet I used to figure out who I was past my parents’ desires. I now speak Romanian to older people in my family and to other people I maintain a certain distance from, English online, a Romanian-English pidgin to my friends and my little sister and a Romanian-English pidgin with certain alterations to my lover.

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Elizabeth

December 20, 2013

In Norwegian, I’m fresh, charming, and girly. In Spanish, I’m tough and dramatic. As the “good enough cook” says, part of it has to do with capacity to speak well – both of these personae were initially adaptations to linguistic limitations – using body language and such to compensate. Another part of it’s the cultural influence. For example, part of my Spanish drama is an echo of the emotionality of many of the Spanish-speaking women I know. And part of it comes down very simply to the phonetic differences. Different language = different sounds = different voice = different person.

There is a popular quote on this subject out there, basically “You live a new life for every language you speak;” though with dozens of variations and attributed to many people.

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