Lingual juggle act
Tan Shzr Ee
The Straits Times
Publication Date: 14-08-2008




Using a different language can apparently change your personality--or your perception of someone else's.
That's what a study earlier this year at Baruch College, New York, and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee has shown up among bilingual Hispanic women: After being flashed TV advertisements in English and Spanish featuring actors in different settings, viewers classified those speaking in Spanish as 'more assertive' and 'extroverted' than the same actors in identical advertisements, now speaking in English.
To be sure, such a trend might reveal more about these specific viewers' projections on Spanish culture at large.
But it's interesting to see how even as we perceive people differently when they speak in different languages, we feel differently ourselves when we do so too.
How does this lingo juggling act work?
Sometimes, it's as much about the language ability of specific individuals, than about purely cultural projections.
Many of my Japanese friends, for example, fit that awful stereotype of "quiet and shy female" when thrust in the company of English speakers.
But once a proper conversation in their mother tongue gets going, all inhibitions are let loose.
The reverse is opposite for me: When I speak in Japanese--having lived there as a child and later taken classes in Singapore--my body language itself begins to frame-shift. I curl up into a cowardly hunch. My voice for some strange reason rises by half an octave and I squeak--before I get all self-conscious about sounding too 'cutesy'.
I begin to nod my head a lot. Maybe all of this can be traced to my inappropriately cultivated ideas (assembled through one too many soaps) about how Japanese women should behave in public. But I suspect it's as much about my fear of screwing up those horrible multiply-honorific conjugations.
Language ability is not the only factor, however. Often, I find that personality and language shifts are also very much in context of personal experiences.
Tra, a near-trilingual concert pianist friend of mine, was born in Viet Nam, grew up in Moscow and now lives in London.
She speaks Russian best, calling it her "easiest language of operation", and feels "business-like" while using it. Vietnamese, which she is next most adept in, makes her feel "tender and intimate--when I'm using it, I feel like I am talking to an old friend".
English, which she uses most often now, is not exactly her best tongue. However, "it's a language I have come to feel most confident in because London has become my home now. I feel like myself when I use it".
Before you claim Tra to be an exception rather than the norm in her polygot behaviour, I'd like point out that--what with all these transnational movements criss-crossing the globe--more and more people are becoming like her: multiply-linguistic, and multiply-identifiable.
That's not just a matter of adopting different 'accents' in different countries or social environments as code-switching is supposed to describe.
I know I feel different when I am speaking Mandarin in Singapore--and it's not only because I'm so bad at the language. My voice drawls, I become more languid, and I pick up strange little facial tics from salesgirls in Taipei.
But when a colleague, C, who recently returned from a stint in Beijing uses it here, there's a completely different dynamic.
The already impossibly articulate Enlish speaker within her blossoms. Talking in Mandarin, C is a stage actress throwing away lines of gorgeous poetry for the simplest chengyu (four-character idioms).
I'm always awe-struck and captivated when she launches so purposefully into the language--not only at her mastery of it on such a steep learning curve, but also because speaking the language brings out such a level of performance from her.
Question, now: What happens when you mix and match your languages in conversation with different people, or--even better--slip iconic words and phrases of different languages in and out of the same sentence? Does one become a schizophrenic in the process of language--and by extension, personality--transferral?
This mini-code switching (or frame-shifting if you like) is actually more common than you might imagine--Singlish being the prime example with its endless pepperring of lahs, lors, mehs and beguiling acronyms in everyday use.
And while a whole new column might be better saved for a fuller discussion on this other big subject, I'd like to think that living in such an information-overloaded and furiously diversified (not to mention globalised) world, the only way to survive is to acquire multiple--if schizophrenic--personas and languages.

interesting article