Once, when I was young and very ambitious, I decided I would re-learn Russian by practicing it with a friend of mine who is basically fluent.
My Russian is rusty—as in, while writing this sentence, I was relieved to find that I still remember how to say “rusty” in Russian. Like many immigrants who came over as kids, I can understand almost everything, can read most things given enough time, can say about 65 percent of what I want, and can write almost nothing in that brutalist rune alphabet of theirs.
My conversations with my friend Anton were gonna change all that, I thought. The idea is that I’d brush up, get semi-fluent, and then travel to Russia to report the great American magazine article. In Russian!
The hitch in this plan came when we had our first “Russian dinner,” and I found myself nodding a lot, agreeing with whatever Anton said, and generally behaving like I’d been lobotomized. If I wanted to make a counterpoint but realized it would require too many verb conjugations, I would go for an enthusiastic “da!” instead.
This seemingly high level of agreeableness was pretty much the opposite of my real personality, which leans more toward “debate me bro.” I was speaking a different language, but I was acting like a different person. This phenomenon would lend credence to a Personality Frequently Asked Question: Does the language we’re speaking affect our personality?
Ever since I started working on this book, I’ve gotten this question a lot. And because I know a lot of Russians, I’ve heard it mostly from Russians. But unlike me, they tend to say that they feel meaner in Russian, not nicer (or more agreeable.)
In his wonderful book Raising Raffi, the Russian-American writer Keith Gessen notes that when he speaks Russian to his son, he is “shorter tempered” and “yelly.” “I found I had a register in Russian that I don’t in English, wherein I made my voice deep and threatening,” he writes.
But how could one language change peoples’ personalities in two different ways?
First, this is a hard question to answer through research because of the sheer number of languages that exist, and the fact that there are five main personality traits.
To recap, these traits are:
Openness to experience — you enjoy novelty, art, and new ideas
Conscientiousness — you’re timely, tidy, and organized
Extroversion — YAAS queen!
Agreeableness — you just want everyone to get along
Neuroticism — you’re anxious and depressed. (The opposite is emotional stability)
So to determine how language changes personality, someone would have to study, say, German vs. Chinese, and their effect on each of the Big Five, but also to compare the results to all other languages. And the impetus for taking on a massive study of this kind is undermined somewhat by the fact that the average personalities of different countries are fairly similar.
Still, this is one of those phenomena that feels true, even if there’s not a ton of evidence to support it. The evidence that does exist suggests that yes, people can feel they have different personalities in different languages. But, this mostly only holds true for people who are both bilingual and bicultural, and it’s heavily influenced by how they perceive that language, not just the language itself.
In other words, it’s not the case that every German speaker has a certain personality and every Chinese speaker has another. But if you are a Chinese person living in Germany, and you associate German with work but Chinese with the comforts of home, you might be more relaxed in Chinese than in German. Because you aren’t very comfortable in German, you might seem more shy (or introverted) when you’re speaking it.
A perusal of this literature finds that bilingual people do sometimes think and feel differently in different languages. A famous study from 1964 found that Japanese-American women responded differently to sentences like “When my wishes conflict with my family” depending on which language they were speaking. (In Japanese: “It is a time of great unhappiness.” In English: “I do what I want.”)
And of course, we’ve all seen those lists of untranslatable words that only exist in certain languages. You’re not going to feel Portuguese saudade in Swedish.
But there’s not much of a pattern behind how this works, and in which languages. And the findings, such as they are, can be conflicting. One tiny study of bilingual women found they felt more assertive (or extroverted) when they spoke Spanish, rather than English. But another small study found that Mexican Americans reported being more extroverted in English, along with more agreeable and conscientious. Here, again, we have one language making people feel completely opposite ways.
There might be something else going on here besides the language. What these study participants might be doing is just adapting to the perceived norms of a different culture. They detect what they’re expected to say in that language, so they say it. “What is taken as a personality shift due to a change of language may have little, if anything, to do with language itself,” writes the psycholinguist François Grosjean. Bilingual people seem to code-switch into (what they see as) the culture of whatever language they’re speaking.
In Gessen’s case, he might have been recalling some harsh-sounding Russian he heard as a boy and adapting by speaking Russian in that way. And in my case, I was adapting to the fact that I don’t speak Russian very well at all.
A note: I’m going to try to answer more reader questions about personality in this Substack, so please email me at olga.khazan@gmail.com, or comment below, or tweet at me, or stand outside my window holding up a boombox, if you have a personality curiosity you’d like me to look into!
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