The bi-personal bilingual: a study of the perceived feeling of a changed self

ABSTRACT

It has been a topic in psychiatry, it is referred to by translingual writers, and bilinguals report it frequently – the feeling of becoming a different person when using a different language. The present study was set out to investigate the reasons behind this feeling. We looked at the effects of biculturalism and personality traits, as well as introspective data from 88 German–English bilinguals. The analyses revealed no significant effects of biculturalism. However, an effect was found between high levels of Agreeableness and an affirmative answer to the feeling of a changed self. Furthermore, an integrated approach suggests that four main categories play a vital role in giving rise to this feeling, namely cultural differences, language proficiency, ‘breaking free’ from the L1 personality, and changes in personality due to reactions of interlocutors.

KEYWORDS:

• Bilingualism
• emotion
• personality traits
• culture
• L2 proficiency

Notes on contributors

Marko Mijatovic is currently pursuing a bachelor’s degree in Business Administration, Culture and Languages at the University of Mannheim. His research interests include bilingual emotionality, relations of bilingualism, culture, and cognition and human-centered design.

Dr A. E. Tytus is an Assistant Professor at the University of Mannheim. She has received her Ph.D. in Psycholinguistics from King’s College, London, in 2013. Her research interests include bilingual and multilingual language processing and representation, bilingual cognitive advantage, bilingual emotionality and investigating linguistic relativity through bilingualism.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Immersion in an English-speaking country for at least three months and, according to a median split, sufficient cultural knowledge and practice qualified for the group bicultural with naturalistic exposure. Sufficient cultural knowledge and practice, but no sufficient immersion, qualified for the group bicultural without naturalistic exposure. The remaining participants were assigned the monocultural group.

2 The scores for each personality trait were translated into quintiles. The participants were then, according to their score’s relative position, located in a specific quintile, which were translated in five groups.