I have an unpublished, unfinished PhD thesis investigating this question. I'm working on getting permission to publish it, but for now I can only give you the summary.
The author administered standardised personality tests to people tested as fluently bi-lingual in English and German. Each of the four possibilities was tested. Everyone got both tests, some tested first in English, the others first in German. Each group had roughly equal numbers of those claiming English as their first language and those claiming German as their first language.
The data showed two distinct types of behaviour. Some of those tested showed no personality shift at all, while others showed an unmistakable change. There were none who changed a little - either they did, or they didn't.
It's been suggested that those who didn't change were, for example, compound bilinguals, whereas those who did were coordinates. Or vice versa.
The conclusion was that a personality shift for some types of bilinguals is clear and unavoidable.
I really hope I can get this material onto the web.
ADDED IN EDIT: Separating the effects of cultural influences from those of the language itself is difficult, and the author of the thesis went to great lengths to look for changes based on the language. that's what makes this research so important (in my opinion). My next step is to contact the supervisor(s) of the candidate, but that's awkward. Working on it.
Here's a bit of my experience to back up how hard it is to separate out the cultural aspect: The English singular 'you' has two words for it in German, 'sie' and 'du'.
The first one is used in situations where there is some distance between the speakers, the second when they are (much) more familiar. It used to be fairly unheard of to hear a German 'subordinate' use 'du' to their superior, whereas in English it would be impossible to even express the difference.
So in Germany workplace relationships tend to have a sense of distance between the various strata. Even if you didn't want to change your personality the simple fact that you'd address your superior in this way would make you behave differently (and so you would show a more deferential personality), because associated with that distance are a whole pile of other personal traits.
It's not as strict as it used to be, but the difference is definitely still there.
Korean and Japanese have several levels of deference, which go beyond a simple dual 2nd person pronoun. There are, for example, different 1st person pronouns which are used for self-reference when the listener is of various social ranks, or under different social circumstances.
In Japanese, for example, a man will say "watashi" for "I" under formal circumstances, and "ore" while getting a beer with the mates.
But English has rules too. Not as clear cut as German, but you wouldn't say 'sup mate?' to you boss, you use a different vocabulary when talking to a superior.
I'd definitely fall into the coordinate bilingual w/ personality shift camp. I think, speak and act in one language or the other, and have difficultly translating, though my comprehension is fluent, like two hemispheres of the brain with impaired communication.
I think two other variables needs to be factored in: cultural influence of the native speakers of the languages and the age at which you acquire the. I can attest to the second factor because I learned four languages before I was six (typical if you grow up in India) and still use three of them almost every day and I do not feel any discernible personality change when I shift the language I speak or think in.
No, sorry. As I say, it's unfinished, it's not mine, and I specifically don't have permission to disseminate it. I can talk about what I know from it, but I can't quote from it. You might email me with any specific questions and I'll answer them if I can.
It's not mine, and it's a long story. The short version is that a chap I know - nowin his 70s - never finished his PhD. We were chatting about the SWH and linguistic relativism and he mentioned it. I asked to see it, he loaned it to me - with permission to copy - provided I never made any of it public.
I'm slowly trying to persuade him that it wouldn't be a bad thing, but it's slow work. He also has the early symptoms of Alzheimer's, so it may never happen.
I speak 2 languages fluently and a few others adequately. I definitely think my behavior is a little different when speaking Spanish versus English, but I don't think there are any deep-seated psycholinguistic reasons for this - it's more because of cultural differences.
An example: in Colombia, when demonstrating the height of a child, you hold your hand vertically, while when talking about the height of an animal, you hold your hand horizontally. If you do the wrong thing, people may assume you're a foreigner and don't know, or they may assume you're just rude. The fact that I learned to hold my hand a certain way when speaking Spanish with Colombians doesn't mean my personality has changed, it means I've absorbed a cultural lesson and if I do it, I do it because I am trying to fit in.
The same things goes for the way in which you express yourself with speech. The way you greet people, how long you make small talk before "getting down to business", how to flirt in a bar; all of these things vary a LOT from country to country and if you want to fit in, then you need to pay attention and learn some things. But again, doing that does not mean that your personality has changed; you're just behaving differently.
One more thing - as somebody who studied theoretical linguistics and speaks the two languages fluently, any time people start making ridiculously subjective claims about a language like "English, a more unemotional and efficient language than Spanish" - keep in mind you're reading complete bullshit.
That's like saying the firewire cable that you use to transfer movies from your video camera is more "artistic" than the USB cable you use to attach your hard drive to your computer. It's confusing the signal with the carrier, and making some pretty subjective claims about the signal too.
That's funny--Colombia was one of the few places I visited during a 9-month trip through Latin America where I was routinely mistaken for a native. (My Spanish is good, but definitely not native.) I chalked it up to people being lighter-skinned (at least in the cities), like me, and also the lack of foreign tourism to accustom people to gringo peculiarities. That, and going to places most tourists didn't bother with (Barranquilla anyone? :) Other places (esp. Cuba) it was much harder to blend.
FWIW I definitely feel like a different person when I speak Spanish. But I think that's mostly I have a very wry, subtle sense of humor which does not translate well. Even to other Americans sometimes :)
First: it's because it's making cultural observations about the people from both places, and trying to somehow say that this is reflected in the language.
For the sake of argument, let's just assume the British are "less emotional" than the Argentines (though attending a football match in each country may disabuse you of that idea). This may affect the way people use language, but it does not affect language. Language is a tool that people use to convey their thoughts. The tool not affected by the thoughts it is used to convey.
Second: sure, English may have lots of one-syllable words for things that are two syllables in Spanish (though the "lol" example you gave above is spurious because in my experience people just write "jaja."). But English requires more use of pronouns, articles and prepositions than Spanish does:
* "No sé" vs. "I don't know"
* "No lo vi" vs. "I didn't see it"
* "vamos" vs. "let's go"
* "saco la mano" "I take out my hand"
What's more "efficient?" It's subjective, and at the end of the day an utterly meaningless thing to analyze because trying to extrapolate cultural behaviors from the way a language uses propositions and articles is about as good science as phrenology or astrology.
Third: let's assume when people say "efficient" they mean "simpler grammar." People often claim that "Latin is more complex than English" because it has nominal declensions. But because of its declensions, word order in Latin is almost irrelevant. In place of declensions, English uses strict word order to distinguish subjects from objects. Which one is simpler? It's subjective, because your answer will depend on whether you're a native speaker of a language more like Latin or more like English.
But if you're writing a program to parse natural language syntax, Latin's "complex" nouns make it a lot easier to parse programmatically than English. What does this say about Roman culture? Nothing. Again, it's the wrong way to look at language - there's no valid reason to draw a connection between grammar and cultural behavior.
One issue that comes up with people who speak multiple languages is the way you speak them and the way you are perceived, which in turn lead to a personality shift.
Say for example, you are a native english speaker from South Africa. You speak with a normal informal accent. Then you go to study french in a school in france - the french you will learn will be formal school french, and not street french.
As a result, people who speak to you in french will perceive you to be a formal, educated person, because of your choice of words. So they will treat you that way, and you will adopt the same formal characteristics as the people who are talking to you.
So it will appear that you have a personality shift when you switch languages.
I think it's a lot more cultural acclimatization than language, although the language you're using at the time may "force" a cultural context. I've certainly been different people when living in different places: the back-woods bilingual (English and "sawmill French") Stan of Northern Ontario had a lot in common with the distictly Maritime-accented Stan who lived in Halifax, Summerside and St. John's, but is almost no relation to the Stan who lived in Montreal or the current Torontonian version -- unless you can drag a bit of Newfanese or joual d'scierie out of me in a conversation. When that happens, the "my time is precious", stacatto-speaking urban a-hole melts away and a mellower (yet, oddly, harder-working) kind of fellow takes over. Granted, that's "anecdote", not "datum", but it frames an alternate way of studying the phenomenon.
It's getting more interesting when you have mastered a language to such a degree, that you can think in it. Having lived the first half of my life in Russia and the second in Germany I can think in both, russian and german, and switch between them instantly.
I found out, that I am more happy and more relaxed while thinking in Russian, while thinking in German helps my problem solving skills. Probably it's correlated with my life experiences. I also talk in a higher, more boyish pitch while talking in Russian, while my German voice is deeper.
At parties I often enjoy talking in English, as I have no cultural baggage at all associated with it, and can use it to say things I would hardly say in any other language (knowing how it may be interpreted).
While it has its upsides (being able to switch to another cultural mindset on the fly helps with taking things easy), having two personalities occupying my brain makes both of them less deep, and while it's more or less interconnected now, translating the pieces of information between the languages feels often impossible in polynomial time.
For a few years I dated a girl (translator) that spoke several languages fluently. She would talk with her father on the phone and sort of regress to the age/personality she had when she primarily spoke that language.
In English she was a young professional. In Italian she was a teenage girl. In Maltese she was a much younger child. I still wonder if they had a richer communication by going through the languages like that. It was so abrupt and obvious that I loved to sit and listen.
I had the same problem when learning Japanese. Whether teachers or friends, I didn't often speak it with other men, and definitely picked up some softer turns of phrase and pronunciations.
Once I became able to hear this in myself I started overcompensating somewhat, and had a few people comment that I sounded unusually brusque or was saying something almost cartoonishly masculine.
I don't think there was anything inherent in the language that changed my personality, but it definitely added another layer of concern and thought to how I interacted with people. A lot of it also had to do with just the more limited set of words available to me, though. Maybe I wanted to say something snarky or yell at a taxi driver or whatever, I might just not have known how.
That's interesting and pretty hilarious. Did you ever find a middle ground between the soft turns of phrases and being cartoonishly masculine?
The part about the "more limited set of words available" is the same for me. My vocab is okay, but strongly biased toward certain (mainly household) topics.
Ha, that's funny, I thought I was the only one. I have noticed that when I speak English (to my wife and daughter) I speak in a higher pitched voice. As soon as I switch back to my native Dutch, I drop to a lower pitch, because to my ear it would sound ridiculous otherwise.
I'm glad to know I'm not the only one! It's the pitch and also the things I say... apparently a lot of it is very "cute". Needless to say, our sex life is in English.
Some years ago I spent a few months in Brazil. My Portuguese was barely conversational, so I had to pay very close attention to vocabulary and usage to understand anything. I noticed that women had a distinctly different vocabulary from men. For example, men had one word for dog and women had an entirely different one, not just the "dog", "doggie" distinction. Talk only to women and you end up talking like a girl, :-)
I live in Poland and practise most of my Polish with my girlfriend. This has caused the same effect, with most of my slang being very girly. It's an interesting position to be in...
When I started to get good at my second language (Japanese), I found it easier to be outgoing than when I was using English. Now it's been several several years and I speak Japanese and English every day, though I use Japanese a lot less (maybe 10% of the time), and I think the distinction has gone away. Sometimes I do find myself wanting to use a Japanese phrase when I'm having an English conversation, though.
I'm a native English speaker and relatively fluent Japanese speaker. I used to speak only Japanese for several days straight, dreamed in Japanese, thought in Japnese etc. when I lived there.
There are words in Japanese I cannot translate to English - any translation just has the wrong meaning outside of the Japanese context.
My friends who've seen me speak in both languages say I have quite different personalities in each language. I would say that it's primarily related to the cultural context I learned the words in.
In the same way different groups of friends bring out different aspects of me, so too do different languages.
I call bullshit on TFA, because last time I checked the german speaking area was culturally diverse in the traits mentioned.
Repeating stereotypes: people in Vienna don't yell and call bullshit on people (they are more likely to talk behind each other's backs), while people in Berlin yell at each other all the time to resolve conflicts (which seems way more healthy to me). These are stereotypes sure, but not more so than the ones mentioned in TFA.
So if there's no uniform behavior identifying even stereotypical german speakers, how can this guy pick up on behavior that is different just because of the language?
OTOH, hanging out in a culture that is more verbose (or not) about their conflict resolution can surely change you. But that's independent from language.
I think what the author is pointing out is that people exhibit different traits of their personality when they speak different languages. She didn't say that all Germans yell and therefore she yelled at a cabdriver but that when she spoke German, a different side of her personality emerged.
Nah, it's actually true for Germany too (where do you think the Americans got the idea? :-), but I guess you hear enough stories about German lawsuits over there as I do here...
Short version: the woman suffered third degree burns over 6% of her body (1% = the size of a handprint) including her crotch, and lesser burns over 16%. She required emergency medical attention, expensive skin grafts, etc. This was not just someone spilling a bit of coffee on their arm and flinching in pain, but instead was a horrific life-threatening injury (I’m somewhat reminded of Rush Limbaugh suggesting that waterboarding is no big deal, similar to a fraternity hazing ritual). A jury made up of people (including self-professed conservative republicans) who initially thought the case was a joke ended up rewarding the woman a big pile of cash, because they felt after hearing all the evidence and four hours of deliberation that McDonalds needed to be seriously punished for what they felt was unacceptable carelessness with customer safety.
> What happened next on the morning of Feb. 27, 1992, was an accident. "I took the cup and tried to get the top off," she later testified. She looked for a place to set it down, but the dashboard was slanted and there was no cup-holder in the Ford Probe. "Both hands were busy. I couldn't hold it so I put it between my knees and tried to get the top off that way." Liebeck tugged, and scalding coffee gushed into her lap. She screamed. Chris leaped from the car to help her. Desperately, she pulled at her sweat suit, squirming in a bucket seat as the 170-degree coffee seared her skin. By the time they reached an emergency room, second- and third-degree burns had spread across her buttocks, her thighs and her labia. All that she remembers is the pain. [...]
> After the spill, Liebeck spent seven days in an Albuquerque hospital and about three weeks recuperating at home with her daughter Nancy Tiano, then was hospitalized again for skin grafts. She had lost 20 pounds -- down to 83 pounds -- and was practically immobilized. The grafts were almost as painful as the burn, her daughter Judy Allen recalls: "She was in tremendous pain; I didn't know if she'd survive this." In August Liebeck wrote to McDonald's, asking the company to turn down the coffee temperature. She wasn't looking to sue,but the family thought she was entitled to her out-of-pocket expenses -- about $2,000 -- plus the lost wages of her daughter who stayed home with her. According to the family, McDonald's offered $800.
> The case proceeded in the stylized manner of the civil courts: expert witnesses were gathered, settlement offers were made. Just before trial Morgan suggested $300,000, but McDonald's wasn't interested. In August 1994 they went to trial before a jury filled with citizens annoyed at having to listen to a case about spilled coffee. "I was just insulted," recalls Roxanne Bell, 38, a preschool teacher. "The whole thing sounded ridiculous to me." According to several jurors interviewed by Newsweek, three witnesses turned the case around. First there were the photos of Liebeck's charred skin and the testimony of Dr. Charles Baxter, a renowned burn expert from Southwestern Medical School in Dallas. He testified that coffee at 170 degrees would cause second-degree burns within 3.5 seconds of hitting the skin. [...]
> After deliberating for about four hours, the jury found for Liebeck. Her compensatory damages -- out of pocket plus pain and suffering -- were set at $200,000. To be fair, the jurors knocked off 20 percent because she had contributed to the accident. Then they hit McDonald's with a stern warning: $2.7 million in punitive damages. "It was our way of saying, 'Hey, open your eyes. People are getting burned'," recalls juror Bell. A month later, trial Judge Robert H. Scott reduced the award to $640,000, calculating punitive damages at three times compensatory. He, too, wanted to deliver a message to McDonald's that it "was appropriate to punish and deter" its corporate coffee policy. Scott, another self-described conservative Republican, insists the case was "not a runaway. I was there." After further post-trial skirmishing, the two sides settled out of court. Part of their deal includes keeping secret the final amount.
So is 170° too hot for coffee? I still don't quite get it. is that Fahrenheit, or Celsius (the latter probably physically impossible, but still)? What temperature is coffee now (at McD and at Starbucks?)?
Feeling sorry for someone doesn't appear to be beneficial to people's judgement.
Fahrenheit. Yes, it is too hot; home-brewed coffee is ~140 degrees. McDonalds was warned multiple times, at least once by a burn victims' society, that their coffee was dangerously hot prior to this case but chose to do nothing about it. I don't know the exact temperatures that McDonalds & Starbucks currently serve their coffee at, but that specific McDonalds franchise lowered the temp by ~10 degrees afterwards, and though I've never measured the temperature of my Starbucks coffee (from multiple franchises), it's never been much hotter than the drip coffee I make at home.
Yet, the jury put part of the blame on her, and further attempts to sue corporations for serving (or making) hot coffee has gone nowhere. The temperature issue is probably just a legal McGuffin here; in reality, she got the money because McDonalds blew it in the first round, when they refused to contribute to her actual costs.
I'm no lawyer, so I'll take your word on the legal aspects. But from an ethical perspective, I think the temperature of the coffee is important. They intentionally sold a dangerous product. The woman's only faults were being kind of clumsy and assuming that the "hot" coffee was ouch-hot, not ER-hot. 140 degree coffee is ouch-hot, and serving coffee so hot it would injure you if you tried to drink it right away is absurd.
Juries are just people, and people blame victims of things all the time.
When working overseas and immersed in a foreign language, I found the processing power required for translation occupied my brain enough that I was less filtered and, as a result, more outgoing. I also picked up a new set of social cues and linguistic mannerisms since I was working with a blank slate of sorts. Both contributed to a slightly different personality.
I definitely have a different personality when I speak Mandarin, a language I studied for a year in Shanghai. I am not fluent, so my spoken mandarin is very simple, but direct, without the fluffiness or sugar-coating that one tends to include in English (my native language). Examples:
English: "Would it be possible to get a receipt for that?"
Mandarin: "Please give me a receipt"
The language helps to reinforce this due to its structure and grammar, however, I find I am more confident, outspoken and to-the-point when speaking in Mandarin. Also, I find I am an incredibly stingy negotiator when buying things, to the point of being a bit of a shit... didn't realise this until a friend came to visit me from overseas.
EDIT: Also, I tend to be more respectful when addressing others in Mandarin, using Sir (xiansheng), Master (Shifu) (as in a learned master), Boss (Laoban) etc to give face. Its an immense help and illustrates to me that a little respect and politeness goes a long way.
I think I'm largely myself at my church and with my friends when speaking Japanese, but if it is a business situation, you are meeting a very carefully constructed avatar that sometimes forgets he isn't real.
I am insufficiently skilled at Spanish to be doing anything other than trying to speak Spanish when speaking Spanish.
I was in a car with a few friends giving directions to another car that was supposed to meet us. The driver of the other car had a little trouble understanding the directions I was giving and asked if we could switch to English.
No problem. I can give directions in English as easily as in the local language.
When we were off the phone, my friends in the car remarked with astonishment that I seemed like a different person in English. At most one of them had any English proficiency but they certainly noticed that my manner had changed and my personality seemed to follow.
My ex-wife mentioned the same thing.
I don't notice it because I'm always the same person, subjectively experiencing the same reality. Evidence indicates, though, that I do have a different personality in English and Spanish.
Another interesting data point. My brother speaks English as his first language, but Mandarin is his primary language.
One thing that he found is that when he immersed himself in Chinese culture, he had no problems. However if he went through a period where he hung out with other Americans and Canadians, he shifted back towards his Westerner persona, and would start to have trouble with the cultural differences.
Does anyone have data on how thinking in a certain language relates to problem-solving skills? I know that e.g. for any programming related task I automatically switch to English, even though I'm not a native speaker. I wonder if you could hack your thought processes to be more efficient? Kinda like pick the right language for the right problem, but for natural languages.
I've been living in Spain for 8-9 years now and notice this whenever I go back to visit Canada or even the UK.
Interestingly, when we go to foreign places where English isn't the official language I find that I take on my "Spanish identity", perhaps like this author did when using German in the Czech taxi.
I'm definitely much more direct and polite in French. I'd prefer to calculate what I'm about to say a little longer than misspeak the local tongue, so I end up appearing much more tight-lipped as a result.
My wife, on the other hand, has spent a lot more time in France than I have, and apparently learned from the school across the tracks--she's much more apt to stutter and fumble with vocabulary (she's got an anecdote about learning the difference between cravat and crevette), but she's much more talkative and seems to get more done with her style.
I actually try to get a different personality for every language I speak to realize it's a different thing. It helps not to confuse the languages and not to pronounce the common words in the wrong way. My spanish girlfriend is a bit annoyed when I speak spanish like a maccho when I don't speak in english like that at all.
Well, I do feel much more saucy when I speak Spanish ;D
I tend to become much nicer when I switch over to Spanish, mostly because I usually speak it in customer service situations. Spanish is my language to help people. That and I always love the look I get when the pasty Russian girl starts sounding like a Columbian.
I've noticed that when I speak Spanish (or Japanese) I become a much more outgoing person. I've suffered from fairly bad social anxiety most of my life, but when I switch to another language I don't run into the same mental walls that I do when I speak English.
native english speaker... I feel it easier to be brusk and borderline rude when speaking French, but also appear to be timid and shy in that language, and probably also humorless. In english, i'm the exact opposite
The author administered standardised personality tests to people tested as fluently bi-lingual in English and German. Each of the four possibilities was tested. Everyone got both tests, some tested first in English, the others first in German. Each group had roughly equal numbers of those claiming English as their first language and those claiming German as their first language.
The data showed two distinct types of behaviour. Some of those tested showed no personality shift at all, while others showed an unmistakable change. There were none who changed a little - either they did, or they didn't.
It's been suggested that those who didn't change were, for example, compound bilinguals, whereas those who did were coordinates. Or vice versa.
The conclusion was that a personality shift for some types of bilinguals is clear and unavoidable.
I really hope I can get this material onto the web.
ADDED IN EDIT: Separating the effects of cultural influences from those of the language itself is difficult, and the author of the thesis went to great lengths to look for changes based on the language. that's what makes this research so important (in my opinion). My next step is to contact the supervisor(s) of the candidate, but that's awkward. Working on it.