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This past Sunday, I attended a group discussion, sponsored by the New Haven Center for Independent Study (CIS), “Speech and Self -- a conversation by, about, and with people who operate in more than one language.”  Quite clear that it was only a hypothesis, our host proposed that the language you speak determines (or heavily influences) your personality.  We must have had about two dozen people present, and each spoke of her or his experience with multiple languages and how it might affect them.

I found the discussion fascinating, and while I am unconvinced that the thesis for the day is valid, I find it has interesting potential, and in any event I heard a number of provocative statements.  Here’s a summary of what I can remember from different speakers:

• A native speaker of Russian for whom English has long been her primary language found herself dreaming in Russian; when she woke up, she found herself making notes about the dream in Cyrillic.
• A woman finds she dreams in German even though she doesn’t understand it.
• A filmmaker who has no foreign languages feels that film is a second language for her, and that she does function differently when directing as opposed to her non-work life.
• One woman has a grandson bilingual in Norwegian and English.  (His mother is Norwegian.)  The boy, maybe seven now, seems instinctively to know which language to use with which audience.  (I wonder whether his intuition is more a sense of knowing what most people speak, and knowing who in particular, like his grandparents, speak Norwegian.)
• A native Hindi speaker long in America dreams in English and finds herself feeling strange when she visits India—that in a sense she is a different person in each language.
• Wanting to be able to understand French passages in English novels, one woman chose French as the language to learn in school.
• I noted that I chose French to study in high school—and never had any doubt I would—because my parents used fractured French to exchange thoughts that they didn’t want their three children to understand.
• One woman studied French, lived in France and became adept in it, then, moving to in Germany, learned German and became more comfortable with it than she had been with French.
• A dramaturge spoke of the tricky issues for her in helping budding playwrights “translate” everyday speech onto stage—that is, as I understood it, to filter daily language into what would be dramatically effective.
• One woman, a native French speaker but fluent in English, found that she felt unable to speak to her parents in any language but French, even though they understood English.
• One woman, a professor of French literature whose first language is English, found that her ex-husband, also fluent in both languages (but whose native language is French), would switch between languages without knowing it.  For example, a French term might get mixed into an English conversation, and he would switch to French.
• The same woman commented that she is much nastier in French—suggesting again that to some extent the language she is speaking drives her personality.  (I wonder whether this phenomenon is parallel to why so many otherwise balanced people can get very nasty when exchanging thoughts over the internet, especially when they don’t personally know the person they're being nasty about: the medium produces a feeling of freedom from conditioned norms of behavior.  In the nastier-in-French case, perhaps swearing, for example, in the second language, however well you know it, feels more detached.  I certainly find that true when I speak another language, though I do not have the fluency in any language that this woman has in French.)
• One woman commented that while most language is a left-brain function, Japanese is right-brained.  No one had an idea why this would be so, or how it may make Japanese language usage different from left-brained-based languages.  Her comment prompted my question of whether neurologists have done any testing to compare multiple-language brain use with single-language.  Are multiple languages in different parts of the language center?  Intermixed?  Do neural connections form between them, or between corresponding diction or grammar?
• One woman offered a penetrating, class-based, observation about bilingualism in schools.  Traditional powers-that-be, she said, and their anti-bilingualism supporters often demand English-only classes because (they argue) for “practical” ends such as finding work, kids should speak the language of their country.  I had often heard this, but then she pointed out that such arguments are made only in relation to immigrants (Spanish being the most common example) and similar English-deprived children whose families are relatively poorly off.  More affluent families, perhaps adding a cultural tradition of valuing broad education for themselves, commonly view it as enriching for their children to know more than one language.  (This contrast may need to address nuances related to which language is your primary one, but it opened an area of thought for me that I had not previously considered—even as I, kind of intuitively, have supported bilingualism in school.)
• An unanswered question arose: what is going on when two people speak a language common to their knowledge but different from either’s native tongue?

I have always been fascinated with words and their power or ineffectiveness.  One day I think they have enormous power, the next day I think they have none.  My dissertation was on Tudor attitudes towards the power of language (and I often had the fantasy of attaching to the final page a pin and deflated balloon etched with the thesis title, next to which would be printed, "Inflate and puncture").  I have prided myself on ever-evolving prowess in my speech and writing.  I am practically a language fascist and easily get upset about English misuse (even moreso when I discover a misuse I've had for years without knowing better).

When I spoke at the gathering— our host called on me first—I mentioned only a couple of things, one of which was that while my French is very good (and my only foreign language that is), I am not fluent in it.  I do decently when having an academic discussion, relatively poorly when conversing about everyday matters loaded with argot (slang), and when I watch a subtitled French movie, the dialogue is typically too fast for me to follow--though if I read the subtitles while listening to the dialogue I can identify a great deal that is left out of the subtitles.  I have always wished I were fluent in French, and when I lived in Paris for six months in 1968-69 I certainly improved (though never to the point of understanding French movies).  But I have always felt frustrated that I would never master French nuances and wordplay the way I can in English.  Long ago I compared my facility with French, compared to English, to a watchmaker wearing gloves as he makes a delicate adjustment.

Once I finished my own comments at the gathering, I found that listening to others’ thoughts prompted more of my own memories:

• Before visiting France (when I was 23), I learned most of my French in high school, with a teacher who spoke only French in class.  I have always believed this helped me enormously in learning and retaining the language.  I recall that while taking the high school classes, when working in the chicken coop I would sing pop sings but translate the words into French (often with literalized faux amis, I knew, but I don’t think that was important).  I have no memory of exactly what I did with, say, Elvis lyrics like, “You ain’t nothing but a hound dog” or Bill Haley’s “See you later, alligator” (though of that I do remember “bis später, alligator,” presumably when I was in Germany in 1958).  When I was driving with friends to Quebec City during college, the accent flummoxed me--though I do remember between Montreal and Quebec City asking a farmer, "Oǜ est Québec?" and receiving the reply, with a sweeping gesture towards the horizon (and perhaps wry glint in the eye), "C'est tout Québec!"  I also remember on that trip giggling repetition among us travelers of  "Voulez-vous vous coucher avec moi?" (I think I wondered why, for such a personal question, one wouldn't say, "Veux-tu te coucher...")  To the best of my recollection, this sentence never got spoken during our visit.
• In 1958, at 16, I spent a couple of months living with a German family on an American Field Service exchange program.  I learned little German then, but I did apparently pick up something of a Bavarian accent.  In college in the early 60s, I took two years of German, did not enjoy the classes, and learned very little.  (My clearest memory of those two years was the day after election day, 1960, when the teacher was celebrating the victory of JFK.)  I had trouble with declensions and retaining vocabulary.  Years later, when I had to pass a timed German translation exam (in which we were allowed to use dictionaries) as part of Berkeley English department Ph.D. requirements, I succeeded on my second try only because I managed to be extremely fast in looking up words; I knew little of the vocabulary.  From time to time when abroad I have encountered someone with whom German is our only common language, and I have barely managed to make myself understood.  On the other hand: when hitchhiking in Europe, maybe Germany itself, a truck driver and I spoke German and he asked me if I were Norwegian.  I have always treasured that memory.
• I have learned smatterings of a few languages, sometimes for travel purposes. 
  

• Elsewhere on this site, I recount my consternation, when teaching in a London secondary school, with the profusion of the expression “different to” rather than “different from.”  For the 2 1/2 years I lived in London, however, I relished my “bilingualism” in mastering British terminology—though I didn’t try to duplicate the accent, much to my students’ occasional amusement, as when I said  “Mos-cow” instead of “Mos-co.”  I still retain some British pronunciations, including “Mos-co” and basil ("bah΄-zil" with a short "a," much to my wife’s chagrin, which is—perversely, of course— part of why I retain the British pronunciation).
• As I discuss elsewhere, I have French family, thanks to my paternal uncle’s settling in Paris with his Parisian wife and giving me two male cousins.  The cousins were raised speaking both languages, but like the New York Lower East Side first-generation of their father and his siblings, preferred the language of their birth country.  Their spoken English is very good, written English so-so (though I can always follow them), but their understanding is excellent—especially, I have long suspected, when pronounced with a Lower East Side accent.  I can go far with them in French, but when I’m in France and I have something private to say to them in public, I’ll typically turn to English.  A couple of summers ago, Henry, my younger cousin, and I sat in a bar discussing very complex, intimate matters in this way.  Their mother, native Tunisian, speaks five languages: Arabic, French, Hebrew, English and Italian.
• Fifteen or twenty years ago, I encountered an Eastern European (Polish or Czech) who told me that when he had recently returned home after 20 years in a foreign country (maybe the US, maybe a European nation) he found the language enormously changed and had some trouble understanding people.

So what do I make of the thesis that one’s language drives one’s personality?  I am sceptical but not dismissive of it.  I am more inclined to think that the influence is a cultural one, what the language represents to us psychologically, or the effect of being in or feeling related to the corresponding geography at least as much as speaking or reading the language—but then I’m not sure how different that re-positioning is from the original thesis.  I do have vivid memories that when I have traveled to a foreign country—and this is probably still true—I have felt liberated in some ways, freed from everyday constraints.  One example is what I said above about relishing my knowledge of much British usage when I lived in London, and though I am surely out of date with youthful slang I get a similar pleasure now when watching a British film or TV show and understanding specifically British terms and references (though I often have trouble following all of a dialect).  I watch a lot of BBC America dramas.  When I visit London or Paris, I feel I am returning to second homes.

One reason I specifically enjoy being in England or on the continent—and again, this may not contradict the opening thesis of the CIS discussion—is that I feel much more politically at home there than in the US.  Here my leftish politics are marginalized; there, even when attacked they are recognized as a norm.

I guess the thesis about language and personality seems too sweeping.  Perhaps I’d be more comfortable saying, “Language drives some personality” or “alternative language can open us to alternative behavior.”  (Is this why groups--e.g., the military, beatniks, spy agencies, hippies, the theater--produce a private jargon?)  Even with what we normally consider languages—speech based on everyday communication—the effect of speaking a second (or third, or whatever) language may vary greatly for different people.  Changed behavior may say at least as much about a person’s underlying psychology and neuroses as about the power of the language itself.  But that still leaves open the question of whether (and if so, why) a foreign language "changes" us more than some other learned talent like, say, bungee-jumping or preparing a meal.

Then there’s the interesting though not necessarily make-or-break question about other kinds of "language" (which I suppose, for those working intensively with them, are also a kind of everyday communication), like film or dramaturgy or mathematics or computer programming languages.  Is a director different on the set and off (for example, are notoriously abusive on-set directors actually pussycats at the dinner table)?  Does the focused language and sequence-of-events of a play (or film—or for that matter, poetry or fiction or social-science writing) produce a “different” writer or audience member?*  Does a brilliant (or run-of-the-mill) mathematician (or chemist or physicist…) become a fundamentally different person when studying or fashioning equations?  (Renaissance thinkers, especially in the 17th century, often cited mathematics as the language in which God "wrote" the universe.)  Is there a reason why computer programmers are so often identified with nerdiness?  And so on.

Translation raises interesting, related questions.  I won't pretend to resolve issues about how translation should balance literalism, cultural context, the spirit of the text, subtext of the original, sounds, or imagery, nor can I say how well any given translator masters the author's "intention" in one or more of these areas.  Rather, the very fact that such questions cannot be avoided by the sensitive translator and reader is indicative of how elusive not only precise textual meaning (or narrative spirit) is but also the degree to which translator and reader can (or should?) be drawn into the "world" in which author and text were originally framed.  The interpretive problem is only a bit less awkward if one is able to read the text in its original, especially if the author inhabited a different time and place than the reader's.

A bright side of kindred issues (if, indeed, the issues I've addressed so far reflect a dark side) is that reading, whether in the original language or translation, whether with deeper or shallower (to the extent we can agree on such terms) insight into the text, is akin to travel, which for many of us surrounds us with new possibilities about life in general and our own lives in particular.  Different people will explore such possibilities to different degrees and in different way, and some may be profoundly changed forever, some for the moment, and some only a little; I doubt anyone can remain totally unchanged, though one may claim otherwise.

If a language does (or can) drive personality, so can other things we experience. Indeed, learning to talk and expanding one's expressive abilities in general all start in imitation of other personalitties.  We start by imitating speech we most hear, then come to try out different modes of expression that appeal to us (like softness or sarcasm or bodily emphasis).  As I used to tell students when coaching them in oral presentation, aside from the primary rule of finding commitment to one's subject and letting that commitment show, trying out specific modes of expression (e.g., a theatrical pause or an arch look) may start out as nothing more than imitation, but if embraced and integrated over time will become one's own, altering one's "personality" to that extent.  If planned novelty in thought and behavior doesoccur in the individual or society, it begins as a tiny variant on what is familiar.  To paraphrase an undergraduate mentor, Paul Fussell, one learns to oscillate back and forth between the familiar and invention so fast as to give the illusion of simultaneity.**

Then there is the nurturing of an image of what one should be, "acting" as though you "belong."  After watching a couple of students ahead of me, I got past a turnstile guard at Moscow University by looking straight ahead and moving casually.  Crossing Red Square against traffic, I sauntered on without looking towards a distant cop who was whistling frantically at me but could not, I assumed, leave his post. When I taught at Harvard Business School, before entering the classroom I typically made a conscious decision to act as if I belonged there despite my inner feeling of charlatanship.  When dealing with a very troubled person (angry, upset, depressed) I have learned how to speak in a focused, low, soft voice and find the place in me that can let genuine concern show in my voice and body.  In public groups, I long since learned to recognize that I am avoiding true engagement when I retreat to continuing (as opposed to momentary) stand-up comic interaction (a version of the class clown, I suppose--the antithesis of what I was like as a child), at which I fancy myself pretty funny.

Certainly oral and written style reflect specialized personality.  Language, of course, is intrinsically manipulative, and when speaking in public, acting, or crafting written communication, one is fashioning a highly filtered self to which, one hopes, others are responding with empathy and interest--and admiration for one's imagined talent.

*In theater and film, one ever-useful rule for writer, director and actor is: “What is crucially different about this scene from any other moment in the characters’ lives?”  And what I consider the basis of the best acting for most people involves drawing on, opening oneself up to, one’s own deepest feelings and experiences.  What about improvisation?  Theater of the Absurd?  As an actor I have seen, and heard of, very peculiar, typically unpleasant out-of-the-scene behavior in other actors—and sometimes in myself, I imagine—and I have never been sure if it’s their “real” selves coming out or idiosyncratic behavior from stresses associated with rehearsal or performance; since trust among actors is vital, this uncertainty has sometimes been sometimes scary. 

**Fussell used this image in a 1962-3 literary criticism course at Rutgers to explain a critical principle that I can, alas, no longer remember.