Normally, when you think about language, you see it as a way of expressing yourself. You can say that your personality helps decide what kind of language you use. Thinking of this, have you ever considered that it might work the other way around as well? What if the language you speak affects the way you think and behave? Since I’m a multilingual person, this is a question I find quite interesting. When I think about it, I do feel different when I talk in Norwegian than when I talk in English or German. When I hear someone speak German, for example, I often get this good feeling. This is probably due to the fact that I associate German with summer holiday and my grand parents.

There is some evidence that when bilinguals switch between languages, their personality changes. This is something that I personally believe is true to some extent, because I have experienced it in my everyday life. It also seems logical, since language is strongly related to culture, that when speaking another language you might associate differently and thus express different sides of your personality.

However, there are indications that language can affect us beyond these personal associations. You have the classical example with the vocabulary of a language reflecting certain parts of the associated culture, like Eskimos having lots of different words to describe snow or seals, and English having many words for different kind of horses. There also exists a hypothesis that the very structure of a language can affect how a person sees the world, which is called the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis . For example, the Western cultures tend to have a grammar that emphasize time and space as quantities, whereas other languages describe the world in terms of events or processes. We talk about walking to the bus and how long it takes, whereas other cultures might be more interested in the fact that the bus is first in one place, then in another. In this way, your language also effects the way you see the world, because your impressions are organized by your mind in terms of language.

Because of the complexity involved, we will probably never now exactly how the relationship between language and personality works. Still, I do find it to be an interesting subject that is quite relevant today, as the world is growing more and more multilingual. It would also be interesting to hear some more experiences that people have had with this phenomena. Do you feel that language can change your behaviour or is it just the other way around?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 12th, 2007 at 1:44 pm and is filed under Philosophical, Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.