New Language, New Persona?

Discovering my Spanish and French Self

“I love the personality I have when I speak French,” my friend Katie recently shared in a voice note. Her sentiment has stayed with me.

What is my Spanish persona? I wondered.

I’m still learning the language, so my first instinct is to say my Spanish self isn’t as intelligent as my English self–unless you consider talking about the weather and the basics of my life as stimulating conversation topics.

That being said, I am livelier when I’m speaking Spanish. And for reasons that I can’t explain, my Spanish is nearly an octave higher than my English. Perhaps my tone reflects the uncertainty I still feel when speaking the language. I have to search for past tense verbs and am never sure I’ve picked the right one. “Que comiste?” I might ask, inflecting on the last syllable. It’s almost two questions in one: “What did you eat?” but also, “Is this the right word?”

A survey conducted for the book, Bilingual Minds: Emotional Experience, Expression, and Representation found that 65% of the 1,000 multilingual people said they feel “like a different person” when speaking a language beyond their native tongue. When questioned further, the participants shared that the extent to which this happened depended upon their fluency and cultural immersion.

Over lunch this week, I asked my friend Jessi, a fluent Spanish speaker, if she felt she has a different personality in Spanish.

Without hesitation, she shared that her mom told her she was more animated and expressive in Spanish. Another friend, Andrew, shared that he felt he listened more attentively in Spanish.

My friend Fabiola once told me, “You don’t even know how funny I am in Spanish.”

“I can’t wait to find out,” I responded, as we both burst out laughing. Her comment reminded me of Sofia Vergara’s famous line: “Do you even know how smart I am in Spanish?”

I’ve gone on dates that have relied on my Spanish. (This could be its own Substack post entirely.) They go well until I exhaust all the topics I can comfortably talk about in Spanish, and then I find myself reassuring the person, that I am actually intelligent in English.

As I dust off my French workbooks and once again study vocabulary words on Duolingo, I wonder what my French persona will be like? Will she be more literary, poised, sophisticated? Will she scoff at things with an air of effortless disdain? I hope so.

Will my French self hear Bad Bunny and instantly snap back to my lively Spanish persona? And will these versions of me differ from my Midwest self?

On Saturday mornings, I sometimes attend a women’s writing group here in Mexico City. One week, we lingered longer than we normally do, talking about our work and where we’re from. After we had all shared our home countries, a woman pointed to me, almost accusingly. “Where are you from in the US?” she asked.

“The Midwest,” I replied.

“I knew it,” she shot back.

I asked how she knew, and she commented that I was so “sunshiny and smiley.”

Oh gawd, I thought to myself. Smiley and sunshiny would not be words I’d use to describe myself, though, admittedly, I do smile. A lot. Probably too much. It’s a Midwest thing.

While I don’t yet know what my French persona will look like, I like the idea that culture and language bring out different facets of ourselves, perhaps parts we didn’t even know existed. Different places seem to coax out different versions of ourselves, and perhaps that’s what makes traveling, learning a language, and living abroad so endlessly fascinating.