1. Multilinguals can have different personalities in different languages
People who are fluent in more than one language often describe feeling like different people in each of them, as distinct aspects of their personality come through stronger depending on which language is being used.
On tests that gauge what psychologists call the “Big Five” personality traits – Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism – multilingual people frequently scored differently in their native versus second languages.
For Marian, this phenomenon directly translated to her ability to write her book. The author, who grew up in Moldova speaking Romanian and Russian, said she couldn’t imagine writing “The Power of Language” in any other language than English, which she learned in school.
She writes: “Writing in English frees me from the constraints imposed by the gender roles associated with my native language, allowing me to be the thinker, writer, and scientist that women in many languages do not have the opportunity to be.”
“There is a professional aspect to it, of course, where I don’t have the vocabulary to talk about neuroscience and cognitive science in Romanian and Russian,” she told Euronews Culture. “But there is also this personal connection, where language functions as a vehicle for culture. And Romanian culture - and southeastern European culture in general - still has a ways to go when it comes to representation of women in science.”
2. A multilingual brain processes every language everywhere all the time
It used to be believed that different languages were stored in different parts of the brain and that each one would get “turned on” when it was actively being used. But research has shown that theory’s all wrong. A multilingual brain actually processes all languages in parallel, keeping them co-activated all the time.
“When your brain processes language, it's not one place in the brain that processes language,” Marian says. “It's a network that's spread across all areas of the brain.”
Because of that, bilingual brains have more pathways connecting different words, concepts and memories across different languages. Practically speaking, that means a French-English bilingual will see more similarities between unrelated words like nail and cloud, for example, than someone who just speaks English because the word for nail in French is clou.
It also means that if part of the brain is damaged, one language might be impacted more than another. Marian compares it to an orchestra that’s lost one instrument.
“If you damage one part of the brain, just like if you take out one musician from the orchestra, some pieces of music are affected more than others,” she said. “A piece that relies more on the violin will be affected more by the violinist not being there than the piece that relies on it less.”